Onion Uttapam : India's Leading Satire Daily

New Delhi - In a new groundbreaking study, researchers at Delhi School of Economics have found that employees don't really make a difference to their companies success despite claims to the contrary.

"Through our research, we found that employees of most companies are duped into believing that their hard work and diligence are substantially important and contribute to the success and growth of their company. But what we discovered through our study is that employees don't really count for much" said Prof. Prabhat Bhatia at a press-conference held at university premises to release their findings.

"The process of duping employees into believing they are more worthy to the company than they actually are is achieved through various means - the primary being the use of motivating slogans like "Our employees are our greatest asset" or "Our employees are our partners in our growth"

Prof. Ramesh Nadkarni added "The high attrition rate, especially in the BPO industry, has prompted many companies in this sector to create strategies to make their employees feel they are special and crucial to the well-being of the company. Bosses and superiors are encouraged to tell their subordinates that they are doing a good job, irrespective of the quality of their work."

"Another important strategy that makes clever use of status-conscious Indian middle-class is to confer junior-level employees, who in the older days would have been designated as just clerks or when promoted given the status of head-clerk, with fancy designations designed to generate feelings of self-worth and importance in the minds of lower-level employees"

"Management Trainee, Personal Banker, Head of Department of Treasury, Executive Director of so-and-so operations, Junior VP of so-and-so department/operations, Operations Executive, Project Executive, Accounts Executive, Executive Strategy Manager, Senior Executive/Manager etc are some of the high-sounding, exalted and lofty designations that are conferred on employees who in good, old days would have been called clerk, teller, cashier, senior clerk, junior clerk, operation clerk, project clerk, account clerk, head-clerk and so on"

Prof. Surjeet Singh advised employees to be realistic while doing self-assessment, though it might be a painful procedure and a bit difficult to accept initially. "Its difficult to face the reality that you are just a cog in a wheel doing routine, unimportant, meaningless projects that can be done equally well by at least three-and-a-half-million universities and business school graduates who have been trained to do your job. But accept you must!

"The first step all employees should undertake in order to arrive at proper assessment of their worth, is to understand what management jargon really means. This can be done substituting all words that are designed to inflate your ego with their more realistic meanings. For example - the word 'important' which is heavily used in management-speak should be replaced with the word 'meaningless' wherever appropriate. Similarly the word 'valuable' should be substituted with the more accurate 'worthless'. After enough practice with this procedure, whenever your boss assigns to you an 'important' project as a 'valuable' employee of the organization, you will actually hear him saying "Shiva, this is a very meaningless project and I think you can make some meaningless contributions as a worthless member of our team." Once you begin to feel comfortable with that, you can substitute the word "shitty" for "meaningless," and you will arrive at a pretty good understanding of where you actually stand in the grand scheme of things."

According to Prof. Ravindra Tripathi who was in-charge of researching the economic impact of corporate sector's activities on the nation, most companies, contrary to the claims made by them of 'changing people's lives' or 'helping build the nation', don't really make much of difference to the nation or its people.

"Most companies are established only to manufacture a product and sell it at profit, to sell it to maximum number of people to maximize profits, to manufacture more and more products and sell it to more and more people to keep maximizing the profits to the maximum extent possible. In other words, companies are established with a single-point purpose - Profits. Changing people's life or building the nation is not much of a priority for any company." said Prof. Tripathi

"But looking at the bright side, this is actually good news for the worthless employees doing meaningless projects." added Prof Tripathi. "By failing to 'be a part of solution', by failing to succeed at your job, by failing to make much of a difference at a place that doesn't really make much of a difference to the nation and its people, at least you are not hurting anyone's interests." said Prof. Tripathi with a laugh.

Comments (2)

umesh derebail said:

	If employees are useless why pay them high salaries and give fancy designation, well to classify a donkey and a horse is real tragedy.
	report abuse vote down vote up

May 06, 2008 | url
Votes: +0

ragamuffin said:

	Wish I'd read this earlier. Wouldnt have worried so much about my boss calling me a worthless ........!!
	report abuse vote down vote up

May 01, 2008
Votes: +0

Name

Email

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment