Ethics(good) and Ethics(bad)
As much as i liked to blog in tamil, i realised the practical contraints (friends and colleagues have font issues in reading tamil online).
cha! oru varungaaala ‘dubukku’ vai thamizh thirunaadu miss panniruchu…:D
Anyways, blogosphere is busy describing and defining ethics to be followed by HRs and IT professionals as defined by senior management in India. Whenever i get to read ethics and HR in the same sentence, i invariably ROTFL…its ivariably like this
Ethics(bad);
Ethics is a bad word and business necessities is the more appropriate term when some top companies,
1) of the days of 2001-2002 did not pay salaries to their employees for 4/5 months (for eg. Pentasoft). They dont try that now, simply because they will be out of business in one month. Again, business necessities.
2) expect employees to work their ass off till late nights/early mornings (All the biggies till date)
3) issue job offers, ask the potential recruit to put in his papers in his organization and then try to revoke their offer saying the project for which they recruited had been delayed to gain an upper hand in negotiation (has happened to me - been there, seen that)
4) force their employees to sign bonds which stand no chance of enforcement in a court of law.
5) retain the right to fire someone in a day’s notice (happened, keeps happening, fortunately not to me)
It’s a different thing that many people working there put up with all this and much more in the name of job security, debts to clear and last but not the least -”onsite” chance. Its their choice. they neither deserve my criticisms nor my sympathies.
Ethics(good);
Ethics is a very good word when some top IT companies,
1) want to instill a guilt feeling in their employees in today’s employee market in India.
So its a question of ‘who’ rather than ‘what’ which determines if an act is ethical or unethical. If an employee gets ruthless, he is conveniently dubbed “unethical”. if an MBA grad in the HR dept gets into the act, its invariably called “business necessities”.
Inspite of all this, i still think employees are bound to give their organisation proper notice and go out on a mutually agreed terms. Why you may ask?
Coz i’m one stupid middle class. Otherwise my “manasaatchi” will disturb me.
November 23rd, 2006 at 2:06 pm
PK,
We all could only moan. I too belong to your class. I have suffered the same when I was in India. I hate the culture of working more than the required hours. Here we have stipulated working hours and no company has rights to ask the employee to work more than the stipulated hours. Again our Indian companies are unique. They follow their culture from back home. Also, our colleagues(Indian) have got something imbibed in their mind. They think that they are the pillars and they continue they try to remain at work even if there is nothing to do. I cannot call them workholic. Many think that it is pride to say that they had so much of work. Most of the capitalist countries tend to do these with their employees. It is really sad that these things are getting worst day by day.
November 23rd, 2006 at 5:47 pm
“Inspite of all this, i still think employees are bound to give their organisation proper notice and go out on a mutually agreed terms”
I joined a company in 2002 (after gracefully exiting from my previous company thank heavens!) and on the first day there i saw
- I agree but for a different reason
a) my reporting manager in my previous company and
b) a manager who had interviewed me from another company whose offer i had turned down
Moral of the story: The world is small. Better not to burn bridges
November 23rd, 2006 at 7:34 pm
I’ve never understood the funda of making employees work 14-16 hours. In a day, an average person’s productive hours probably ranges from 4-6 hours.Beyond that, its going to be vetti timepass…so by forcing someone to work for 14 hours, companies are kicking themselves in their asses, reducing productivity, motivation and employee loyalty!
November 23rd, 2006 at 8:16 pm
“i still think employees are bound to give their organisation proper notice and go out on a mutually agreed terms” - Apart from that manasaatchi part, I also believe its a small world. Not really worth burning your bridges on your way out, I don’t think
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:20 pm
balaji sir,
idhu oru theeradha vyaadhi.
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:22 pm
bala
small world indeed! adhayum add panirukanum. but i thought its a smaller workd for designer types like me!
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:25 pm
subha
6 hrs dhaan maximum.
enna problem na we have this culture of taking calls in office after 6 in the evening.
that adds immensely!
also most of them are IT services based companies.cinema production madhiri dhaan. time is money for them.
also neither the workers nor the copany have much regard for the worker’s free time.
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:25 pm
WA
unmai dhaan. but i;ve always thought developers have a bigger world than ppl like us
November 24th, 2006 at 5:01 am
Hi Prabhu,
am an irregular reader of ur blog. Can’t help commenting on this post
//also neither the workers nor the copany have much regard for the worker’s free time//
I am not sure about the workers but the company has no regard. In the company I was working this was one thing that more than offset all the other positives.
There were 2-3 new hires whom I was guiding. America call-ukkaaaga Adyar office-la okkArndhirukkaradhu en thalayezhuthu. But the new hires were just learning about the project at that time, so I didn’t ask them to stay.
Once my boss asked me how come I was staying back all the time whereas the new guys left early (adhaavadhu 7PM early-am ).
The exact words he said was: ” These guys are new to town. What will they do going home ? Let them stay in office and learn”
I was too shocked to react. Not only was his attitude terible, but the fact that it didn’t even trouble him to put it in words was even more shocking.
Idhula tragicomedy ennanna, the project I was working on was about predictive analysis of HR performance
November 24th, 2006 at 6:33 am
msp
i guess every IT pro has a tale to tell abt long working hours.
once i was coming home around 8 PM. And i saw my neighbour coming from office too, he never comes home before 11.30 - 12 inspite of being newly married. so i wondered how come he’s home so early.
his response astonished me.
he’s home early bcos he has a midnight flight to catch to germany.
no prizes for guessing where he worked, Infy sholinganallur
and ofcourse we’ll have NRN and the likes give gyaan about people being productive for 8-9 hrs and go home