CREATING A HAPPY WORKPLACE

When work is duty, life is slavery; when work is pleasure, life is joy.” These famous words of thinker, writer Maxim Gorky more than sum up the need for reinventing the present-day workplace. The fast-paced modern society has demolished many a beliefs about the workplace, created many and distorted some. Not that the workplace has not changed. It has changed and changed significantly. There is more speed, more technology and much more greed leading to astronomically high productivity.

However, whether all is well or not is a question that needs to be answered? Apparently yes. Salaries are shooting through the roof. Technology is providing a lot of leisure and there is significantly high output. The simplest assumption is that it is a win-win. The management and the employees, the shareholder and the vendors, everyone is gaining. Materially it seems to be a highly viable model. But is this sustainable also?

Though it will not be easy to conclude, yet given the various indications that can be noted about the state of the affairs of the workplace, we may be inclined to believe that all is not well. The frequent complaints about work-life balance, the rising number of workplace stress victims, the increase in the number of burnout cases are all suggestive that the workplace is not as hunky dory as it is made out to be.

Managements complain about the attrition rates, employees complain about a menace called 24x7x365. None is at peace. This cannot be sustainable. What is missing in all this seemingly colorful façade of the workplace is the realisation about the basic nature of the workforce. The workplace has changed. So has the mix and the appearance of the workforce. But the essence of the highly diverse workplace of today still remains the same. At the periphery, the members do appear to be technology-driven robots who are wired to the many variations of networks and dance at the click of the mouse. But in the core they remain emotional beings, who feel, think and who are moved more by connectivity of the head and the heart rather than the various programming languages that are developed to control their behaviour.

It needs to be understood that merely a good pay and pleasant work environment may not necessarily make them productive. Productivity depends upon the internal state of mind. The most important attribute determining productivity is the happiness of the employees. To make the workplace productive there is a need to think beyond the ritual and awaken the spiritual, the inner happiness of the employees. A happy worker is a productive worker if he perceives that happiness arises from the workplace.

It becomes extremely important for the managers to create a happy workplace. Happiness is contagious and happiness makes the workplace productive. Happy people tend to be much more productive and creative. They are willing to walk the extra mile. They are less likely to take leaves and are considered to be healthier.

How to do it? While models may not be easy to find, cues can be picked up from the leadership style of Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of South West Airlines. His philosophy was simple — “the employees come first”. Management thinker Kanter’s comment on Kelleher style is noteworthy: “Remarkable results are possible when employees are liberated to take charge of the rules and have fun on the job.’’ The key — look after your employees well.

YESTERDAY’S PROBLEMS, TODAY’S SOLUTIONS

You can’t solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions,” Albert Einstein is famously quoted as having said. The context and intent may be open to interpretation, but people often quote this to suggest that traditional value system will not work in this fast-changing technology-driven world. So change the way you were doing things or else your ways will not work.

Who can deny this when Einstein, arguably the best brain even produced, says this? But wait a moment. This is not to question Einstein’s genius. Only we need to look at the contention. Are today’s problems essentially different than those of yesterday’s? There is need to think more objectively.

What were yesterday’s problems? The first one was the humankind’s weakness to fall for temptations and allurements. According to the Bible, the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, were the first persons to go by devil’s advice. Incidentally, they broke the first law, the divine law. The first crime was committed for greed. Coming to the second one, again from the Bible, why did Cane kill Abel? Simple — envy, greed, and ego. Well such instances are legion in the Bible.

That was the Occident. Coming to the Orient. Why did the battle of Kurukshetra take place? Same problem — envy, greed and ego. Still not convinced. Come to the modern times. Why was Indira Gandhi unseated by that historic Allahabad High Court judgement? And why did she impose the Emergency? Why could VP Singh defeat the Congress that appeared invincible with 415 seats in the Lok Sabha? Why did Jayaprakash Narayan become a rallying point in the early Seventies? And very recently, why did the Congress fare miserably in 2014 Parliamentary polls?

The problems were not much different. It was corruption, the deviation from dharma, the righteous path. Well Einstein was perfectly right. It is our interpretation of Einstein that is wrong. There are only two paths in this world — the right path or the path of dharma and the wrong path or the path of adharma.Those who have followed the righteous path have triumphed in the long run. If it was Noah of the Old Testament, then it were the Pandavas of Mahabharata.

The problems of the present times are the same as those of the past. Naturally, the solutions of the past are still relevant. Apparently, it seems that the world has changed. It may have changed as far as technology is concerned. But the greed, ego, lust behind the technology still remain the same because the human nature remains fairly constant. Man does not live in the Stone Age, but the Stone Age still lives in him.

Human psychology has been fairly constant over the ages. If the Facebook posts indicate the humanity’s desire for likes, that is recognition, how do you explain the story that we read in our Hindi textbook in the early Sixties about the boy Gurudas whose ambition was to see his name figure in the print media. The name of the story is quite suggestive, ‘Akhbaar mein Naam’ or the name in the newspaper.

The problems of today are similar to that of the yesteryears, so we still have to apply yesterday’s solution. Greed was a human weakness aeons ago. Greed is a human weakness even today. Everyone wants a quick buck — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Technology is changing but psychology is still found wanting.

SIGNIFICATORS OF COMMERCE AGE

From the Stone Age to the present day post-modern era, humanity has come a long way passing through the various epochs of ancient, medieval and the modern. Historians and management theorists alike call the present era by a fanciful name  the knowledge age. Whatever that may mean the fact is that we also believe this to be an age where knowledge rules. And we have reasons, too, to believe in the old Baconian canon  knowledge is power.

True, we have access to tonnes and tonnes of information. We have greater power to store and retrieve information. We have more information about natural phenomenon. All these have given a mistaken notion of invincibility and we are living in a make-believe world as we swim in an ocean of information. But wait a minute. Is this vast ocean of information really knowledge? And in all sincerity, are we actually in the knowledge age? We are sadly mistaken.

This is definitely the era of information, but that information is not power in itself. It can only be so if converted to knowledge. Moreover, knowledge in itself is not power. It is the right use of knowledge that is power. In information technology literature, they talk of giving one million typewriters to one million monkeys and find that chances of getting anything meaningful is still bleak. It is the ability to make knowledge out of information that is important.

But though getting the hypothesis right, we seem to be drawing the wrong conclusions. We keep on running after information, coining bombastic jargons like big data, data mining, cloud computing, fuzzy logic and even more. The logic, of course, is fuzzy — literally.

In these data-driven times, we need to realise that when data is in big demand, fly-by-night operators take advantage of this craze. Thus, the data gets fabricated, cooked, or manufactured and sold. The present era needs to be seen in this light. These are the times when everything can be bought and sold and as the materialists would like us to believe there are no free lunches. And why lunches? Even water carries a price. In fact, people advocating a price for air also, that is nature’s gift. We are rather in the age of commerce.

Everything is commerce and commerce is everything. More so, information. Look at the pointers of this age. The very nature of society has changed as everybody wants to make a quick buck. Without doing. Without deserving. So love has become transaction and relationships are investments to be giving returns later. For some sections of media, news is a product that is to be packaged and sold. Everyone is into business. Doctors and education, schools and hospitals, temples and religion.

Actually the marketers never had it so good. This age of commerce is driven by media that creates a need for everything; even things we don’t need. Rather, only the things that we don’t need. And we are buying those things as our reasoning has been blunted by the barrage of information. We have spurious products, adulterated food and motivated research. With just one objective: To enhance consumption. Unheeded consumption, unneeded consumption. The present times can be succinctly defined by those famous opening lines of Charles Dickens in his classic literary work A Tale of Two Cities: “These are the best of the times. These are the worst of the times.”

A DATE WITH ENVIRONMENT

Today is the World Environment Day. Well, yet another environment day because it has been a few decades since we have been shouting environment-environment even as temperatures rise, monsoons go astray and catastrophes with fanciful names keep striking mankind, year after year.

With one trend, though. Their frequency is rising. So things have hardly changed. Yes, there is more awareness about the threat environment degradation is posing to mankind. Yes, there are events being organised to promote environment consciousness. And yes, more and more people are talking about their concern for environment. But is anybody listening? This perhaps is the biggest issue.

There are distinct lobbies. From green technologists, to green crusaders to green businessmen. But the objective still eludes as global warming continues to increase and the warning is loud and clear — the efforts are too little and much more is needed. We are experiencing a planetary emergency with the fever of the earth continuously rising. Ambient air quality tells that the suspended particulate matter is reaching danger levels in more and more cities. The groundwater is receding and is reaching vanishing point. The soil quality is becoming more and more alkaline. The forests are getting denuded and the rivers are gradually disappearing.

But what is mankind doing? Organising meets to think what to do and there are as many views as the number of people. All this may sound pessimistic and cynical but can we afford to be optimistic when with each passing year there is more and more disheartening news? Striking a cautionary note may well be in order and timely when despite so much environmentalism and environmentalists, the quality of environment fails to pick up.

Hard statistics suggest that summers are getting warmer and longer with every passing year. In fact, we are slowly approaching the threshold after which catastrophes will sweep civilisations. Awareness time is over and enough warning has been sounded. It is time to act, and act fast. What needs to be done may not be a difficult question to answer if we realise just one basic truth that the state of the environment is more a matter of ethics and morality than science and technology; law and governance.

The fault lines can be seen in the consumption pattern and lifestyle changes that the rise in vulgar consumerism has brought about in society. Marketers and manufacturers on one hand, and poverty and misery one the other are both contributing towards environment degradation. Greed of the rich and need of the poor have made strange bedfellows in creating environmental mess in a developing, nay, fast-developing country like India.

Solution lies in changing the ways of life that is the consumption pattern. The kind of food that is wasted by passengers travelling in the elite express trains like Rajdhanis and Shatabdis may well be an eye-opener as to where we are going wrong. The volume of water that those RO purifiers waste is yet another pointer. To make one glass of water families that have installed the ROs spill three glasses. Petro fuel wastage and electric energy misuse are a massive drain on our scarce resources. More than the technologies it is our thinking that needs to change. Global warming may not be clearly observable by individuals in their lifetime, but in the context of the earth it is actually happening very fast.We need to act faster!