Friday, August 31, 2007

So Much For Being Employee Friendly

The conference room was filled to the full capacity as the hype over the talk by the head of our sub group had already created a lot of intrest and anticipation among me and my colleagues.Every seat of the room was occupied well before the mentioned time.To add to the curiousity, this talk was held amidst thick clouds of confusion within the unit due to the resignation of a lot of top brasses of management.So there was bound to be some sense of enigma about what the top managemnet had to offer for clearing the doubt and letting the employees know where the unit as a whole is heading.

As usual the speaker who is one of the top managament cadres stood up & started delivering the talk with all those glossy slides & with all those numbers showing where we are progressing,how far we have come since the last time we started concentrating on customer satisfaction etc etc. 20 minutes went by with all those figures which we have been seeing for the past two years.No new things.I don't say customers are not important,but what about the employees .The slides were just copied from some earlier presentations .Some were just modified to let people know that at least the speaker has cared to go through the slides.30 minutes went by.We were anticipating some refeneces to the steps those have been taken to curb the employee dissatisfaction,something to let people in the room know that their concerns are being looked into.Already the group head had resigned some days back.

To be very very precise,these were the words with which the speaker wrapped up the talk "Please don't go by rumours.We are really taking care of you all.Be sure that this company won't do injustice to you in terams of monetary & other benefits."

I genearlly don't ask questions in these meetings of late as I have becme cynical of these peoples' ramblings which have become kind of monotonous.But this time I was really curious.I asked ."****,"addressing the speaker by name."Do we have any plans as such for this as we have one for customers ?"The answer was capital "NO",but we are trying to come up with some thing."

I don't know how many more meetings will take place before the people at top come up with something which is really worth talking about.Till that time I think we have to go ,drowse of seating at the back and come back with a cynicism which becomes more day by day.