My job allows me to work from home, however, this time i chose not to. I was returning from home, around 3000 miles away from Bangalore. While sitting on the train to Kolkata, i meet a person who after a few lines of introductory conversation asks me, "How loyal are you to your company"? I was a little stunned to have heard that question all of a sudden out of the blue, we were talking rally races before that. It's not very often that i am caught off guard but this was one such occasion. I told him that "I am loyal to my work more than my company". He got a little irked by the answer. He seemed a little biased about the IT Industry in India where the average lifespan of a particular Job is not more than 3 years. He asked me, "Why do you switch companies every 2-3 years?" My answer, "We do that because IT is a very dynamic industry and you cannot be stuck with one technology forever, unless it's cutting age. If your company doesn't give you a room to move around, you'd rather not want to rot at the same place and become a less skilled employee in the market". He was not satisfied with this answer. He went to tell me about his profession. He is a doctor, who would see 100s of patients on a single day by loosing sleep. He asks me, "How many hours do you sleep in the night?". I felt a little irked again. I chose to close the topic and did not feel like continuing the conversation.
Today about 1 and half months after that incident, i sat down to think on why i feel the urge to move around various companies. Is it something to do with my Salary? The answer surprisingly is a NO.
Let's take an example of an organization that has about 100 employees. The "degrees of separation" between the CEO and an employee on an average will at max be 2. An average employee closely impacts the revenue of the organization and the margin for error per employee is very less. This means that an employee is more accountable towards his company's end goal. Employees are highly skilled, there is nothing like a "Bell's curve" in picture and most of them are happy. Motivation factor? Mostly to do with accountability. Now let's name this Company as A (well i got to a late naming this time). Let's take another Company called B, with the same portfolio as A. B on the other has a very profit minded CEO/Owner. He wants to grow (Sorry for using all masculine gender) his company. For that matter, he decides to make an IPO. Considering that this company has performed exceedingly well in the past, buyers have a lot of faith and the IPO gets sold out in minutes. Now we have more investors on this company than that one guy who owned it. Every investor looks for profit. The CEO has to instill confidence on the company's shareholders. He decides that volume is more important than quality. Even though you can think about having no bell curve during appraisals but now the company looks at the Supply Chain Model. Here the resources (supply) are the People who will do this volume work. Slowly but steadily, company B figures out work items that can be executed with less skilled people. Hence rather than hiring from the IITs, it now falls back to the other Engineering colleges for recruitment. A imbalance is struck in terms of accountability because the person who is doing a less skilled work might still screw that up and not impact the companies overall revenue. First quarter results of expansion - Excellent. The CEO and the Shareholders are really happy. Now they go on to set a record margin for the next quarter. More hiring takes place and all of a sudden this company's employee skill structure becomes like a view you'd see with Windows De-fragmentation. As the company expands, the "Degrees of separation" between that same employee grows to a phenomenal number. All of a sudden an average employee, concentrate only on his area of work and forgets about what the overall organization goal is. Now, his accountability reduces from delivering revenue to delivering for his module. Slowly, he dissects himself from feeling a part of the company to being only responsible for his job. Now I know why i felt that I am Loyal to my work more than my company.
The idea of making someone feel "Special" not just within the organization but as a citizen is reducing day by day. IT is trying to put it's footprint into everything that we do in life. Calling it a giant bubble might be too early but isn't it true that the impatience level and the dissatisfaction we suffer for our job is ever increasing? The resources are becoming more volatile also courtesy of the imbalance the Salary Structures create post a Job Switch. We might be happy today about it but then who is the person who is responsible for this? I leave that to you, to find out!
