Indians Happy at Workplace, But on Lookout

Varuni Khosla

New Delhi:





ATTRITION AHEAD? A Dale Carnegie study shows 71% workforce is eyeing new positions despite high job satisfaction levels of 88%

Early this month, a multinational firm based in Delhi took on the mammoth task of relooking at why its staffers wanted a promotion every 18 months. For this company , and a few others, it has become a type of “syndrome“ they have to deal with.If the employees don't get promotions, they move on to other avenues.This could be attributed to the fact that in its first 25 years, the company grew so fast, it was promoting employees at this rate. Today , growth is slowing down and the company is unable to promise as many promotions.
A study , which was shared exclusively with ET, by New York-based leadership training company Dale Carnegie has found that even though level of job satisfaction in India is extremely high at around 88%, as against the global average of around 56%, about 31% of employees in the country are looking for a job right now and nearly 40% will look for one in the next one year. This means nearly 71% of the workforce is either thinking about or actively looking for new positions.
A part of this has to do with the age of the workforce -that is fast-moving, dynamic and ambitious. This phenomenon is very different from elsewhere in the world, said those behind the `Global Leadership Study 2016.' “It would make you think that it is fantastic that Indians are happy in their jobs,“ said Michelle Bonterre, chief brand strategy officer for Dale Carnegie Training. “But this could be because there are so many fresh highly educated graduates being added to the talent pool every year as compa red to other parts of the world. For employers, that is a huge challenge and they have to come up with how to hold on to employees even though they are happy.“
The study found that behaviours of immediate supervisors across the world had a significant impact on job satisfaction and retention. It showed that an individual's reason to stay with a company depends on an internally and externally reliable leader. Consultants said both India and China are going through transition, unlike the rest of the world, where employers must get transparent with employees.
“In this part of the world, employees aren't just looking for work satisfaction,“ said Jappreet Sethi, co-founder of YoStartups.com. “Sculpting their career growth and money is more important and I think there's nothing wrong with this approach. All these years, employers played patriarchs but when it came to sacking them, they didn't think twice.“
The leader who follows principles or someone who walks the talk is internally reliable. An externally reliable leader is someone who can be honest open and trustworthy . It added that when employees had leaders that were both externally and internally reliable, the percentage of those looking for jobs dropped dramatically by half.
“India is this way also as a result of function of the number of job opportunities. Data here is very different form the US, Germany or the UK. The war for talent is long over and talent has won,“ Bonterre said.
Globally , the study found that about 17% of respondents were very satisfied in their jobs. When supervisors fre quently exhibited the most important developmental, interpersonal leadership behaviours, the number of employees reporting being highly satisfied increases by about two-thirds.
In Asia, employees of supervisors who consistently demonstrated the top five effective behaviours were nearly twice as likely to say they are “very satisfied“ than Asian employees in general (21% versus 11%).
In Brazil and Mexico, the absolute difference was greatest at 14 percentage points, with 43% versus 29% saying they are “very satisfied“, a relative increase of 48%.
In Europe, it was 23% versus 16% and in the US and Canada, 34% vs 24%. In both these regions, the relative impact was about a 40% increase.
Sethi said employees want to know where their career is heading since time is finite.
“In the West, it is a trend that people will not work in that one job that they had five years ago. A third of the US, for instance, is shifting to consulting and temporary assignments. The best talent will not be hindered with a full-time job. Employers must relook at the way assignments are given. Tie up compensations with success metrics etc,“ he added.

Source: Economic Times, 26-07-2016

Dec 05 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

`Indians don't speak up, just follow orders'

Sujit John & Boby Kurian

Mumbai: TNN





We're Trained To Solve Problems, Not Find Them, Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Tells TOI

Vishal Sikka, 47, took over as CEO of Infosys at a time when things looked dim for the once vaunted software company . It had gone through over two years of underperformance compared to some of its peers. Sikka's appointment was a surprise and a relief. Surprise because of his background in software products that was very different from the services space at Infosys.Relief because many wanted a fresh face at the helm. In the four months since Sikka's appointment, the Infosys stock has risen significantly. In an exclusive interview to TOI, Sikka says he feels a tremendous burden of expectation:What are your thoughts on the first four months at Infy?
The atmosphere is electric.People are so excited, there is so much positive energy that has been built up -it's difficult to describe. Never seen anything like this. Yes, may be in the trip to Australia with (PM Narendra) Modi. But that was little different. I walk into these rooms and people go crazy . There's a tremendous burden of expectation.

How different is it from SAP?
I have to think more about this.But the propensity to change, the desire to improve is awesome in Infosys. Over the last year there was this turmoil, people leaving. I created a team to look at simplification of processes, to deal with problems people have. Everybody in the team was so genuinely passionate about simplifying things. I was very impressed.Our development centre (DC) in Chennai told me they would be the best embracer of artificial intelligence among DCs in Infosys. You don't normally find large companies embrace change this way .
What makes it so?
Part of it comes from our education, which is at the heart of Infosys. Our Mysore training campus is so awesome. We can train on such a massive scale -16,000 trainees at a time for 23 weeks. Mr Murthy used to call it learnability. Education is in the mindset of employees, they are keen to learn.
What do you see as your big challenges?
One is that the company processes have not kept pace with its massive growth. Another is that we have to improve the confidence of the youngsters.This is true for all Indian IT companies. The consistent feedback from customers is that though Infosys is without comparison in quality and delivery and we follow orders dutifully, we don't speak up, we are not proactive. As an innovator, this made me very sad.We are trained to solve problems, not trained to find problems. We have this cultural thing -if I speak up, it is questioning of authority . This is totally counter to the Western mindset. We serve Western companies, and they expect us to speak up. John McCarthy , father of artificial intelligence and who was in my examination committee, once told me this unforgettable thing: Finding and articulating the problem is half the solution. The other half is to solve it.
Many of the solutions to yesterday's problems will be automated. But no matter how intelligent robots become, they will not tell us what the big problems are, they don't have the imagination of human beings. That's why I'm moving the company in that direction.
Do you think this will result in some confusion?
The results of the change will take a while. But the mindset change will happen instantaneously . The industry has been in a downward spiral, even the big western guys. They are hiring cheaper and cheaper, jamming people into projects faster and faster, hiring from more and more mediocre places. That is the wrong direction.That spiral goes to zero. We want to create an upward spiral, create more and more value. Turbo props were excellent planes, but they lost the battle to jet engines. There's a certain inevitability about going up the value chain.

Top job, big bucks

In July this year, India's software services giant Infosys announced that it was hiring former SAP chief technology officer Vishal Sikka as its new CEO at a compensation that could touch $5.08 million (Rs 30 crore or so) per annum including variable pay. Sikka would also be entitled to stock options to the tune of $2 million.

Sikka's remuneration made headlines because - though middling by global standards - it was the highest salary that had been offered to a non-promoter CEO in the country till date.

And it was vastly higher than the salary of the man who was doing the hiring. N.R. Narayana Murthy, who had given the final nod to Sikka's recruitment, was drawing a princely sum of Rs 1 per annum. Murthy had stipulated he would only accept a token salary when he agreed to come out of retirement in June 2013 and take charge as executive chairman once again.