Fallacy of Corporate Integrity

If you have not heard the ‘heaven and hell’ joke in the context of recruiting and being an employee  the next day, then you have not worked long enough in the corporate.

The sarcasam is seething and it shows the dark underbelly of corporate. The blame can be diverted to a large number pf places from over enthusiastic, under trained recruiter to pushy business managers who want the recruitment to be completely like a sales process and a factory churning out numbers without making sure that the right quality is coming through the gates. It is like the 60s and 70s of America, making loads of cars with the poor quality until the Japanese hit them on their own home ground.

Corporate is fighting its integrity war with the value poster hanging on the wall everyday. The little lies about the numbers, the cut and paste culture, turning out reports which are unchecked or delibrately inflated. Getting the numbers for the week which in all likelihood will disappear next week and the recon will not happen. The untruth of the company culture to a prospective candidate, the false promise of CTC to an unsuspecting candidate who understands it too late. All these small lies are what generates the culture of non-performance, non –productive employees and ‘look the other way’ managers and many times of the senior leaders.

Almost all the companies in corporate will have honesty/integrity as one of their core values. And almost all of them break it the day the poster gets distributed. There are corner talks on how this is not practiced on a day to day basis in the company. Whenever an employee asks an uncomfortable question, he is made to feel guilty and more often than not laughed at by his colleagues. It is difficult to walk the talk. Companies who are serious about such things have serious consequences attached to the violation of the values. Many times they take the extreme and tough action on the defaulting employees for most of the others to get fed on the rumour mill and for things to be set right. It is tough to ask someone to go for violating the values of an organisation but most often than not it works. In my experience as Head of HR for a large organistaion, I had to take these calls. They never made me comfortable but as a corporate leader I had maintain the sanctity of what values we standby.

Tough role for HR but something only they or the CEO can uphold and are the last man standing on such matters. The fallacy has to be lived everyday, if we are serious than HR will have to take tough stances and execute some tough measures, it is not easy but many a times it is not difficult if you come to think of it. Very often when you stand up to the bullly called the world and shake it by its beard, you will be surprised as to the beard comes off in your hand.

Come on, Shake the bully often!!

Myth of Work-Life Balance

We love to cut up pieces of life. We like to be in control by making byte size pieces of our whole. We love to live life and hate to work. We love the dichotomy of life and make sure that we say that we work to live a life while primarily we are but living. We find a lot of meaning in our life while most of us are constant cribbers about our work. Our work has become the venom and our life is the antidote on a day to day basis.

There is only life, the myth of work life balance has been created by someone who does not understand the concept of Life. Life is holistic, it consists of all parts, work is but one of them. The minute you say work life, you are negating life and you are pitting work against it. All corporate employees have been brain washed into thinking that what you do outside of work is life and what you do at office is work.

Is this notion not ridiculous?  Take a look at all of us and specially human beings who do not work for  the corporate, do they not do work? Are they not doing something or the other to earn a living and  live a life. It seems that corporate is a different  world existing within this world. The thought of corporate being another world and having to live by the rule of work life balance is demeaning.  I think we need to reinvent the work life balance paradigm and get back into the paradigm of life where work is part of life. Work happens without corporate too and in corporate. We need to think of ways where employees who truly value the organisation should be working there, the purpose of the organisation should resonate with their purpose, with their life.

Work life balance negates the purpose of work and makes it the enemy of life.  We try to keep on balancing the two, imagine a paradigm where you do not need to strike a balance. The best work life balance is to be seen in the arena of sports, art, drama etc,  it is but one for the actors, poets, artists. If the artist does not love what she is doing, it shows and public does not respect her work. If she is working all the time, how boring arts will become. The purpose of drama and art will disappear and it will just be work, how meaningless!!

The reason it is so simple in many of the other forms of life (which are different from corporate) is that the very purpose of existence of a person is joined together with the work she does. The "Why" of work needs no explanation, it is the purpose of existence.

Simon Sinek beautifully shares in his TED talk, the importance of explaining 'Why' of work. If most of the organisations explain the ‘Why’ of their existence, we will have better organisation and productive employees. To take work out of work, organisations will have to make sure that they keep their efforts “on” to continuously explain the 'Why' of work.  We have to make an effort to get this going and it is like the revolutionaries pursing a cause, they have to keep going at it and keep on explaining the reason for existence constantly. For they fear if they lose the touch with the reason for existence, people will not be motivated to join and nothing will keep them together, they will wither away.

In modern day organisations, we have to be explicit about the "Why" of existence. This “Why” helps many employees with the purpose they are working for and no longer the demeaning work they undertake eveyday. Work Life merge into one and no longer be enemies of other.The myth of Work Life balance needs a lot of undoing for it to become meaningful for employees and organisations. 

Let us live Life and make Work but a part of it.