I perhaps was sleeping when it all happened Part II

This post is a continuation from the first part of this article (my previous post). Read on...

We're all in the process of forgetting what is termed 'the values of life'. This is true not only for individuals, but also corporate houses. There was a time in the history of India, when corporate houses (many of them being government organizations; in fact, many of them, still do) used to value what used to be called as 'employee loyalty'. Both employee and employers used to have long term relationship, a special bond, which kept both going along for years together. Even though small time differences almost always used to crop up, it used to get solved with reasonable effectiveness almost every time. One of the reasons for this, obviously, was the non-availability of choices in those days. But, more than this, there used to an unspeakable something - you may even call it a love, affection, pride - to be associated with an organization in those days. The organization used to recognize this, accept and reward those who remained loyal with them for longer periods.

But, today, this term doesn’t exist in our dictionary. Companies don’t care for individuals, as well as the situation used to be. People have become just ‘resources’ (if you’ve ever been through a typical software project scheduling exercise, you know what I mean), and can be replaced by anybody else. Moreover, the industry never faces a dearth of enough manpower in a country that produces more than a half a million engineering graduates passing out of colleges every year. Industry tends to think that any ‘resource’ can be swapped, with some amount of training provided to the new ‘resource’. But, sadly, none of those who think likewise wants/likes to think about the adequacy of such a training program. The more important point is, although the people can be trained on almost any aspect of work (including domain knowledge), there is one significant part of people that can never be trained – the mind. It is impossible to train people on attitude and motivation towards their work. I don’t think companies don’t realize this. They do, but they choose to ignore this…

Given all this, if you talk about loyalty and stick around in the same company for more than 3-4 years, people will laugh at you. People will even start looking at you suspiciously. What perhaps would’ve landed you up in lime-light more than a decade back, will cause you to undergo undue mental stress. If you don’t understand me well, I will give you an example. Let us say, we’ve a guy X working for Y organization for the past 3-4 years, and the appraisal time at his organization is fast approaching. One of these days, X meets with his friend A, who works for B organization. Both of them engage in a casual conversation, which will invariably end up in a talk about each other’s profession. Three things will be discussed almost always - Work, Manager and compensation. Both will vent out each other’s frustration on these aspects and will highlight all ‘bad’ things that is happening with them in their respective companies. However close they are, these friends will never speak about certain things. For example, they will not discuss about 1) good things that happened with them at work 2) anything bad that occurred from their own end that may’ve caused issues at work. Before they part, they must’ve discussed about other opportunities in the industry, about compensations etc. Now, the second guy promises his friend to help him push his resume through the organization he is working for. The first guy is obviously happy at his friend’s helpful mentality, but what he doesn’t know is that his friend - the second guy in our story - has been actively trying to switch jobs already for the past few months!

Do you see similarities with your own professional life? I am not saying that this is what always happens, but to a large extent, unhappiness (or the perception of it) crops up through one’s friends. Once this incident happens with you, you can never remain inactive. It is human tendency to want for more, more money, more fame, more acceptance, and hence even the sternest mind starts to waver. Presently, you are in great mental stress to quit what you’re doing now and move to a greener pasture. This phenomenon is termed peer pressure.

There is another much similar one called societal pressure, that we will discuss in the concluding part of this article...