Shades of Gray

Cost-cutting must be one of the most commonly used words these days. CEOs and MDs of top companies are making appearances all around us and are declaring that cutting costs is going to be one of the focus areas in the next 12 months. Of course, these statements are tied to the economic slowdown which doesn’t seem to be ending soon.

That the purpose behind cutting costs is sustainability of the business is beyond doubt. And in tough times, expenses must be cut. However, almost every time someone from the senior management utters the phrase – ‘we will cut the fat, not the muscle’, it indirectly means that people are going to be fired. HR personnel throughout India and the world are busy searching for excuses in order to meet their sadistic objectives and almost always the reason cited is poor performance. I find it hard to believe that all of a sudden so many people from the Indian IT industry have turned poor performers. Hard to digest till Infosys declared that now the tolerance for poor performance is zero. Does this mean that companies that valued excellence and claimed to be driven by intellect were actually turning a blind eye to incompetence all these years when the going was smooth?

To an extent, this allegation is true. Most IT companies, big or small, have tolerated laggards and not just tolerated them but have even promoted such employees. I remember one Ms. P. Sahu, an Account Manager with a leading IT firm, who was in the habit of having weekly project status meetings that lasted for a minimum of two hours every Friday and all that was discussed there was what children were doing in school and how her children didn’t let her sleep the previous night. You will easily come across people who did fabulous work in their projects but were given a lesser rating as they didn’t participate in account-level initiatives like celebrating birthdays of their colleagues. Many of such poor performers like Ms. Sahu are among the senior middle management now presiding over the ‘pink slip distribution ceremonies’ that happen every now and then.

I am all for cutting costs and promoting a culture based on meritocracy. But IT companies have themselves to blame if they find themselves with a large pool of employees who don’t have a project and are on bench. These companies always had a sizeable bench size and this was seen as bench strength. But these firms cannot shrug the blame now as they themselves created an illusion of explosive job growth in IT sector by hiring in far larger numbers than required. Even today as these top firms fire people in the name of poor performance, they are continuing to hire freshers in large numbers. This is because freshers will be paid lesser salary compared to the experienced associates and as a result the wage bill will be in check. A true capitalist will find nothing wrong in this selective firing but at least the companies should have the guts to admit that this is for purely economic reasons and not for performance.

Coming back to cutting costs, companies must fully exploit other avenues before resorting to layoffs. Here are some of these:

Cut back on deputations and transfers: These increase costs for the company as well as for the employees.

Try to retain employees: Like acquiring a new customer, acquiring a new employee is costlier than retaining the existing one.

Reduce Business Travel: Despite teleconferencing and videoconferencing technologies being available, only a handful of companies have effectively utilized these.

Discourage the culture of working extra hours: A lot of managers look down on employees who work for 8-9 hours and want their subordinates to stay late in the office. Owing to this culture, a lot of employees also prefer staying back, both for the sake of appraisal and for using free internet and air conditioner. Just imagine the electricity that will be saved if people worked for not more than 10 hours and no more than 5 days a week unless business required them to work on weekends.

Switching off PCs before leaving: Make it mandatory for employees to switch off their monitors when leaving their workstations for more than 1 hour and to shut down their PCs before leaving for home.

When confronted with tough economic conditions, senior management should lead by example by turning down their bonuses and curbing wasteful marketing and relationship building expenditures like paying high stipends to summer trainees. Only when these steps have been tried, should companies consider firing employees. Granting leave without pay or with 25% pay for 3 months may be a better idea than snatching away somebody’s means of livelihood. I am not turning communist but one must explore all other avenues before taking extreme steps like layoffs.

I have completed almost two months in Kolkata, the capital of Left ruled West Bengal. The experiences have been mixed as they would be in any part of the world. It is a city where life is not as fast as Mumbai, where you get delicious street food ad where you can have a sumptuous meal for fifty rupees. But there are certain areas which weakens the case for the city. The metro and the former capital of India, performs poorly when it comes to customer service. The attitude of service staff (not all but most) is appalling at best and if you are moving from Mumbai, Delhi , Chennai or Bangalore, you are in for a culture shock.

The first I experienced this ’so-what-if-you-give-me-business’ attitude was when I was eating egg rolls at a roadside stall. It was 8 pm on a Friday evening in Sector-2, Salt Lake, one of the posh localities of this city. A couple came and ordered for two egg rolls. The vendor prepared these and asked for money. The gentleman handed him a 50 rupee note. The vendor asked for change and when he didn’t get it, declared – ‘Roll hobe naa‘. I was taken aback at his refusal to sell rolls that had already been prepared. Nobody would buy them stale and a roll costs Rs. 10, so it was not that he had had to produce change for 500 bucks. The couple had to walk away.

Sector 5 Salt Lake is where all companies are located. I had skipped lunch and so at around 4 pm, went to Tea Junction, outside RDB Boulevard for some snacks. I asked for two samosas (costs Rs 8 each) and gave out a 20 rupee note. The vendor said – ‘Change nahi hai?‘ (You don’t have change). When I replied in negative, the standard answer came – ‘Samosa hobe naa‘ (No samosa then). I had to leave and move around to get something else to eat. I am still not able to believe that this guy couldn’t have managed 4 rupees change after doing brisk business (the place always have people coming for tea and snacks) all throughout day. May be if he had waited for another customer, he would have got his change.

One of my colleagues has shifted from Chennai. He had an Airtel number there and since he has been with Airtel for some time, he wanted to transfer his connection to Kolkata. So, he visited the Airtel shop at City Center, Salt Lake. The guard and asked him why he wanted to transfer. My friend got so pissed off that the guard would not let him speak to the Airtel Customer Care guys sitting behind the desk that he just walked out. And the Customer Care guys just kept lloking at the whole incident and didn’t intervene at all. Now, this gentleman gives a business of around Rs, 10,000 per month. Shouldn’t such a customer be treated with respect?

There are many such incidents that I am coming across almost at the rate of two every week. My blogging here is not going to change anything but perhaps this is the reason why City of Joy offers no joy to the customers at Kolkata and why people keep ranting about work culture and unprofessionalism in this great city.

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Postscript:

I would like to add here that I am very happy with the Airtel Broadband service that I have recently taken. My calls and queries have been handled very efficiently. However, this post is not a bundle of lies – my mobile service provider Vodafone has refused to send me a PDF copy of my April bill as the paper copy has already been generated. So, they say I will get the PDF version from next month onwards. What puzzles me is why can’t they accept and process my request immediately when PDF generation costs them nothing! [April 25, 2009]

A lot of my female friends who have watched Dev D, a modern take on Devdas conceptualized by actor Abhay Deol and directed by Anurag Kashyap, have dismissed the film and the concept. The reasons I hear are one of these:

• There is nothing new about the story except an overdose of sex
• It’s all about sex and drugs

However, it is this alleged ‘overdose’ of sex which indirectly hints at the message that today’s younger audiences should have grasped. But first, let me honestly accept that some of the scenes are indeed quite shocking. Like the one where Paro, played by newcomer Mahie Gill, carries a mattress to the fields on a bicycle in order to be able to make out with her lover Dev. Or the dialogues that Chanda, the MMS scandal victim played by Koel, speaks to her on-screen father.

Let me make it clear here that while these scenes are shocking, it doesn’t mean that they don’t happen in real life. Go to villages and you would find that couples having sex in a field is nothing out of the world. Chanda uses the same slangs and vocabulary that today’s college going crowd uses daily.

So where is the message I am talking about? The message lies in the treatment Paro receives at the hands of Dev. And it’s not a single message, rather there are four points that the director leaves its audiences to ponder with.

The first point is the obsession with sex that today’s college going youth has. In the movie, it is not difficult to assume that Dev is addicted to porn. Look at his expressions when he is downloading Paro’s topless picture on his laptop and you would know what he has been learning in London. The second example of this is when Dev tells a married Paro that he wants to love her and in the very next scene talks about ‘making love’ as if you cannot love a person without ‘making’ love.

The second point about our society reveals itself in the way a village guy who claims to love Paro talks about her sexual behavior. Not only he says this to Dev, he brags about it to others as well. I was surprised how true this is to real life. During my intermediate and engineering days, we often heard such stories about girls who were more outgoing that the average. And the rumour-mongers often went to great lengths to claim that their stories were nothing but the truth. The fact, as we know now, is that 9 out of 10 such stories were totally fabricated. How easy it is for we guys to malign a girl’s character, isn’t it?

In the movie, Dev believes the rumours he hears about Paro. The reason is simple. Because Paro is ready to do it with Dev, her beloved, she must be doing it with other guys as well. And he calls her a slut. Isn’t it amazing how quickly we brand women who are not meek and have a mind of her own as ‘sluts’? This is the third point that Anurag Kashyap makes.

Dev refuses to marry Paro, breaks her heart and his own in the process. And after he goes on a path of self-destruction, he finally meets Chanda and finds love. And it is here where the fourth and probably the most disguised point about the movie comes to light. Not many people have understood that Dev D is a slap on the face of a male-dominated society that is so obsessed with a women’s virginity. Dev has no reason to doubt Paro’s virginity but does so because he himself is no saint and finally accepts as his own a woman who has taken to prostitution. Can it get any more hard-hitting than this?

Dev D is a tight slap across the male community who equates love with sex and brands women as sluts.