Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Monday, Mar 03, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version
Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Monday, Mar 03, 2008 ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version |
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Mentor
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Management Columns - The Fourth Quadrant New productivity challenge 
R. Shekar
Sangeeta’s summer project concerned the study of mutuality of expectations, set by the employers on the employees and vice versa. By polling the perceived effectiveness of the employees in their current roles using the five questions below, they hoped to improve productivity and satisfaction levels at work. Redundant work that could be eliminated altogether. Repetitive work that was more conducive to automation. Low value-add that could be delegated to a junior. Advanced work that demanded more time for acquiring mastery. Task that was inappropriate to one’s title, role, erudition or compensation. Adopting the definitions for hygiene and motivation from the classical works of Henry Mintzberg, when she sat down to collate the findings along the two dimensions of, what employees looked for (X-axis) and those that the employers were keen to provide for (Y axis), it told her much more about the orientation people had towards work than the work per se. Grudging mutual tolerance characterised the personnel assigned to several of the bought-out services that were provided by the employer and patronised by the workforce entirely out of a sense of hopeless necessity rather than out of free choice. Employer’s apathy was patently manifest in a segment of employees that had an intuitive sense of something amiss but felt lost somehow. Examples were found in areas where the repeated requests of employees to upgrade the quality of work assigned to them were repeatedly disregarded by the employers culminating in the duplication of the same work at several ends of the company, seniors continuing to do the same jobs they were doing prior to their elevation, assignment of ad hoc work that bore no relation to their job role and worse yet not finding the time to do the work they enjoyed working on most. Disengaged workforce dominated over two-thirds of the workforce that declined participation in a futile exercise. Their sense of self-esteem blocked any effort to change the order of things. Progressive workforce represented that refreshingly different, albeit a minority, that demonstrated a sense of purpose with enough spunk to prevail upon challenges they considered meaningful and carried on regardless. Sangeeta’s unresolved dilemma: To table the discovery unearthed by her summer internship and alert the company to an impending disaster; or play safe instead of rushing into an area where the Angels feared to tread? More Stories on : Management | The Fourth Quadrant
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