The Hindu Business Line : Will succeeding be less painful in 2007?

My job gives me the opportunity to meet a wide variety of employees from across industries and demographic groups. As I speak to each one of them, I feel energised by their focus, sense of optimism and high levels of energy. The opportunity to learn new skills, work in global settings, make carefree choices and make lots of money seems great. The new face of India that we were all waiting to see is finally here.

Sadly, while their gains are great so is the pain they have had to go through to get there. As I listen to more and more people, I am convinced that a lot of this accomplishment has indeed been dysfunctionally painful, making me wonder if it was worth all the effort.

Will the New Year be any less painful for these and lakhs of other employees who are all working overtime to move corporate India forward? A look at current trends and all the available microcosmic evidence tells me that there is little hope of the pain getting any less! I see three imbalances standing in the way of the average Indian employee succeeding with less pain in the coming year.

The task-resource imbalance

The serious imbalance between the task demands and the resources available to do it will continue to haunt most of our lives. This imbalance will take several forms.

You could be a cardio-thoracic surgeon searching for a trained nurse, a shop floor supervisor searching for a qualified workman or a school principal searching for a dedicated teacher; you will all be spending lots of your precious time searching for help instead of serving your customers.

You could be a CEO, a CFO, a Programme Manager, Store Manager or Branch Manager. Chances are you will all be working two levels down because the people you have are new to the job, untrained and do not understand you or your organisation culture and that's all you could manage to get.

You could be a young business process executive or software engineer or even an HR professional in a large corporation. You are likely to feel that you have a lot more skills and capabilities than what your current job demands of you. Given the fragmented job, designed in the interest of scale, you run the risk of experiencing alienation.

As a middle or senior level executive, you will continue to regret that in the promise of empowering you, desk top technology has cheated you into spending disproportionate amounts of your time on routine and non-value adding work — work that could well have been happily carried out by a secretary thereby making you far more efficient. This is, however, unlikely to happen because there are very few of them left these days!

The result of all this is "pain", but you will bear it with a grin because the upsides that you signed up for are just too much to give up.

The work-life imbalance

Whenever I am at the Chennai airport on a Monday morning, I bump into at least a dozen people I know who all are setting out to work in Mumbai to return by the end of the week.

In the last 12-odd months, I have read at least three articles that have dealt with the problem of imbalance between work and life. `Get a life' that appeared in the November 2005 issue of Fortune magazine, `Plateauing: redefining success at work' published by Knowledge@Wharton in October 2006 and `Extreme jobs — the dangerous allure of the 70-hour work week' published in the December 2006 issue of HBR all talk about the serious human and social consequences of complete imbalance between work and life. The HBR article refers to four in bed being normal these days — oneself, one's partner and two BlackBerries!

Technology could be blurring the lines between work and home. Maybe the achievement-oriented employees actually love it. Perhaps the entry of women into the workforce in significant numbers is adding to the conflicts and guilt. Maybe the life altering rewards that lie ahead are too much to give up. Whatever the drivers, the truth is that this cannot go on for too long.

I do not see organisations doing much about this in the coming year. The business case to act towards better work-life balance is not yet ready.

The opportunity imbalance

In my mind, this imbalance is perhaps the most complex and serious of the three imbalances. To quote the UN Human Development Report 2006, "Over the past decades, there have been unprecedented increases in material wealth and prosperity across the world. At the same time, these increases have been very uneven, with vast numbers of people not participating in progress."

As we enter the New Year, it would be appropriate to ask if even within the tiny universe of corporate India, everyone is able to participate in the opportunity in equal measure. In the name of meritocracy are we creating barriers that make it difficult for some sections of our society to participate freely. The demand for reservations in the private sector will continue to be alive till such time that the "affirmative actions" promised by the leaders bear tangible results.

Further, the emerging labour market model (see the accompanying diagram) tells me that in the interest of cost competitiveness and risk mitigation, most organisations will want to expand their Q1 and Q4 jobs and contract their Q2 & Q3 jobs. The value proposition for the employees in the Q1 segment will obviously be "no frills" forcing them to keep constantly switching jobs in search of a "stable Q2 job".

A third area of imbalance is the growing gap between senior executive pay and frontline pay. A quick review of current pay tells me that a 100 to 250 times difference between CEO pay and a frontline employee's pay is no longer unusual in India. This gap is only likely to grow in the coming year contributing to greater discontent.

How will we cope?

So, how will employees cope with these imbalances even as they strive to reap the benefits of all the opportunities? I see the return of the human relations era. However, this time around, it will not be driven by behavioural scientists and motivational theorists. Nor will it be driven by CEOs and HR leaders.

The second round of the human relations era will be heralded by employees themselves. The experience of living in transient times will teach them to take charge of their work and their lives. If they find conducive and community-based organisations with enlightened business and HR leaders, they will consider themselves blessed and some of them will indeed find such organisations.

Others will take charge of their own destiny. They will invest a good part of their earnings in their ongoing education. They will vote with their feet when their jobs become impossible. They will protect their leisure as much as their family jewels. They will experiment with free agency. They will learn to develop a third dimension — salsa dancing or social service. They will also learn the art of living and loving.

They will do all of this and still smile and get the next quarter going for you.

Three cheers to the new face of India.

(The writer is the founder and CEO of Totus Consulting, a strategic HR consulting firm that designs and implements HR systems and processes)

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Will succeeding be less painful in 2007?