Business Today Net Special

The Dilbert Company

Great employers are not born, but made. Ditto, the worst employers. But what makes one company a great place to be in and another the abode of gloom? Why do some companies manage to attract talent despite their lower pay and longer hours, while some others must make do with the second-best? In other words, what makes a bad employer?

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Once, for 32 months I worked in a family run business that was everything a good workplace shouldn't be. Appraisals were ad-hoc and happened once every two years. Performers could hope to be rewarded every two years; non-performers, every three. No individual outside the extended (and somewhat dysfunctional) family that ran the business could hope to rise beyond a senior-middle manager's position. The hygiene factors sucked too: when I left this organisation not so long ago, it was still doling out interest-free car loans of Rs 12,000 (that's right, I didn't miss a zero). So, why did I spend close to three years in that hell-hole? The work was great. The youngish lesser-scion of the family who ran the division I worked in was extremely accessible. And I was given responsibilities far beyond what my designation warranted. Still, poor-pay, lousy hygiene factors, and the lack of recognition took their toll, and I moved on.

For every best employer profiled in BT's ninth anniversary issue, there are, probably, 500 of the other kind. It's easy to be a `worst employer' in India. Jobs are hard to come by, the ranks of the educated-employers continue to swell, and most Indian companies (including some blue-chip ones) continue to wallow in the middle of the profit zone. Here, profit margins aren't particularly high; but the companies can get along by simply hiring employees endowed moderately with grey matter. Ergo, people simply do not matter.

The CEO of one of the company's BT wrote about in its issue was a trifle more charitable. We'd just discussed employee-orientation in his industry (software) and were slowly veering around to talking about people practices in industries that weren't quite a fortunate in terms of market- and popular-perception. "You can't help it," said the CEO. " It's a question of money. My industry is capital rich. Salaries aren't really a constraint. That isn't the case with the others". While the CEOs observations will, no doubt, help reduce dissonance among his peers who head old economy behemoths, they don't always hold good. Some companies operating in industries with low glam-appeal do boast exceptional people policies.

Would it be possible to distill the few unique characteristics common to worst-in-class employers, the same way, the BT-Hewitt study did for best-in-class ones? Of course it would, and here they are:

Worst employers do not believe in the concept of ownership (unless it is something they own). This manifests itself in a reluctance to share things with employees. From stock to information, the worst employees believe in keeping it all.

Worst employers believe they know it all. Thus, they are loathe to listen to what employees have to say. Worse, these companies also believe their employees know all it takes to do whatever it is they are expected to do and spend little or nothing in training.

Worst employers believe money is everything. They pay scant attention to the workplace or to work-processes. Anything goes. After all, they reason, they pay their people well.

Worst employers prefer to treat their employees as inanimate objects. These are companies that believe the greatest management innovation in the history of mankind to be the concept of using numbers to identify employees. Numbers don't have lives, so I guess, these companies can't be blamed for not addressing work-life issues.

And finally, worst employers believe employees have little or nothing to do with the performance of the company. Everything else follows.

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