Gut-Wrenching Anxiety

“I could be laid off “, admits Ravi Kumar working in a prominent software company, when questioned about his primary fears as software professional. The gut-wrenching anxiety finds an echo among techies across the industry and reflects the hard reality of global work cultures - organizations, the world over, are in a state of transition from secure hierarchy-based to more temporary cultures. As organizations embrace short-term work contracts and adopt euphemisms such as natural attrition and right sizing, diving profits, techies are trapped in a chronic state of stable “insecurity.” The dawning realization that the organization’s first commitment is towards the market rather than the techie, regardless of his/her skill sets or experience, have cast a palpable fear of redundancy in the community. Reports of job cuts churned by the media on a daily basis have sent confidence plummeting. For the techie, wooed with pink champagne, just a year earlier, the transformation to pink slips has been rather hard to stomach. Organizations that boasted of state of the art facilities for employees and mouthed platitudes on flexi-time, work life balance and made claims on human capital lost no time in writing off the same human assets in a bull and bear market. Worse, certain Indian companies adopted a stealthy and sly approach towards retrenchment, leaving employees out in the cold, casting doubts on employee rather than company performance.

As the first generation global employees feeling the sharp razor of job cuts, Indian techies’ lack coping strategies to adjust to the fluid job culture of recent times. For most Indian techies, unlike software engineers in the West, which has had a history of job cuts during recessionary periods, there are no precedents or earlier examples to fall back on to deal with professional devaluation. And the confusion, bewilderment, turmoil and the unprepared ness to deal with it all have created an unnatural climate where individuals vie with each other to demonstrate organizational commitment and work longer hours even as they live in fear and weariness of that very organization.

Long hours and a climate of presenters do not, however, translate into greater productivity or a conducive work environment. The management of most IT companies is trapped in an unenviable situation where it needs to trim work force to achieve growth targets and yet keep morale of existing employees high. And even companies, who are bang on target and are not, resorting to job cuts face an increasingly edgy, vulnerable and insecure work force. In the face of obvious panic, companies need to be increasingly inventive to ease the perceived horrors of the new work culture and assuage techies’ fears of their immediate futures vis-à-vis the organization.
In today’s environment keeping employee morale high is the primary HR challenge and should try simple ways to keep every employee connected to the company. These include a fortnightly company update by the CEO.

In India, where most companies pay lip service to employee welfare, the decision top keep channels of vital communication open in these hard times is reflective of a sensitized management. Most companies report a visible easing of panic and tension among employees.. This is, however, but the first step towards shoring employee morale. The malaise of insecurity extends deeper and, in the long term, employers can help employees survive the millennium organization by reconciling them to the short-term work culture and equipping them with skills to accurately diagnose their abilities, get appropriate training in deficient skills and marketing themselves professionally to organizations. With due respect to all IT companies, who are just coming to terms with the realities of the global market, we still have still a long way to go in this direction!!!