An Open Letter to India’s Employers

This is in response to An Open Letter to India’s Graduating Classes that was published in NYTimes India.

Dear Indian Employers

This is your new/current employee. We are MBAs, Engineers, B.Com’s and everything between them. We take the salary that you give and keep fighting to understand the peanut-ness of that. Many of us have landed on our first job, discussions around salaries and job titles are over, and we’re ready to contribute.

Life is good – except that it’s not. Not for us, your employees, at least. Most of your assignments will be substandard, clerical, frustrating, white lies and with limited application of our skills. We too need to gear ourselves up for broken promises and unmet expectations.

Today we regret to inform you that you are spoiled. You are spoiled by the “India growth story”; by an assumption that the Indian Education system is capable of producing talent that you companies will continue to exploit; that the growth will continue in double digit and we will continue staring at you – with bowls in our hands and hope in our eyes – for the alms that you give and the life that you suck out of us, and still remain snobbish, thinking that you are obliging us, the prospective/current employees.

So why this letter, and why should you read on? Well, because based on collective experience of innumerable employees that they had with the employers like you, some truths have become apparent. This is not a guide for you or any employer like you; only an indication of what your employees expect from the employers they plan to work with. Read on – you might find few points resonating with you, which you expected when you started your career and felt thoroughly cheated when none of them were met.

First, I will state in brief why the five key attributes employers typically seek and, in fact, will value more and more in the future cannot be met by us.

1.    You speak and write English fluently: Dear Employer, your prospective employees come from coveted colleges, which many of you could only dream of going to. Most of the prospective employees have studied in English schools where they were taught in English right from the beginning. This is not to boast rather to inform you that we know how to speak and write English fluently. The exhibit indicated that you are talking about jargonized English. I would like to bring to your kind attention, dear employer that we, the prospective/current employees have been forced to use the jargonized, errr… Corporate English because that is what your “esteemed leaders” understand. In case we use simple English, we are labeled as pedestrian. So, please look at those three fingers before you point the one at us.

2.    You are good at problem solving, thinking outside the box, seeking new ways of doing things: Dear Indian Employer, there is a reason why companies like Google, Apple and 3M are constantly listed in the Most Creative Companies of the world. Most of their employees’ energies are directed towards the work they do rather than fighting to catch the train so that they reach the office before 9:00 am, lest half their salary will be deducted. So if you want creativity, out of the box thinking, please revisit Mr. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and start focusing on fulfilling our needs which are hygienic and let us focus on self-actualization! Please also do a self-check to see if your esteemed organization is ready for the creativity we show. We are young people ready to go; however, when we put in all the efforts to come up with radical and revolutionary ideas, it’s deeply frustrating to see a 58-year old veto against it because he “feels” it’s not right for the organization. We respect the experience; but we hate dictatorship.

3.    You ask questions, engage deeply and question hierarchy: How we wish! When we face the music from the higher ups in the hierarchy because we didn’t pay heed to the sequence of the e-mail ids, we get a little confused about the gyaan that your HR sweetheart gave to us during the campus presentation about questioning hierarchy. Also, as and when we ask questions, which we often do, we expect an honest answer rather than we-will-get-back-to-you-on-this response. Since you never get back to us, we reach out to you only to receive round about answers which make us as educated about the topic as are managers about nuclear reactor. Worse, we are singled out and threatened to “maintain the dignity of the position”. Even we accede to the fact that major part of this comes from strong cultural bias of deference and subservience to titles in India, and it is as much your responsibility as it is ours to challenge this view. You do your part. Trust us, our effort will follow.

4.    You take responsibility for your career and for your learning and invest in new skills: Dear Employer, I request you to please appreciate the fact that many of the new employees spend good amount of their salaries in learning the things they love. Assuming the offices are at locations like Mumbai, Delhi and such places, the cost of learning is not cheap. Extrapolating this to the office scenario: most of the new hires are ready to go to learn new tools and technique and new sector knowledge. However, after attending trainings, it’s found out that the trainings are made for the mere purpose of making them which are not applicable in the real world scenario. This is discounting the fact that the support the new hires should get from their managers for attending the training programs are missing. The training programs are more looked at as means to shirk the work and have fun, the consequence of which is snide remarks. So before you comment on our quench for the learning and training, please get your current employees go through the training on how to encourage the new hires build their learning curves. I am sure not even 15% will take those trainings and not even 20% read the mails that you will send.

5.    You are professional and ethical: Everyone loves to be considered a professional. I have a good sense of humor. Guess even you have a good one. The real story of “ethical” practices comes out only when an actually ethical audit company strips the companies of their erstwhile hidden dignity/reality. However, we face your ethical standards the very first day when the difference between the salaries and job profiles promised and the ones exhibited in reality vary vastly. Please understand and appreciate, dear Employers that we exhibit behavior like job hopping every year, demanding double-digit pay increases, taking one company’s offer letter to shop around to another company for more money only when we feel under-utilized or over-worked or under-paid or over-exploited. Further, if we need to stretch ourselves daily, it’s time for you to look within, and not blame on us. There is either something wrong in the delegation or the greed of you, dear Employer has increased to a level which is sucking life out of us.

Now I would like to share with you the expectations that we have. This might act like a guide to you and all other employers. Kindly note that there is no laundry list that we want: just one thing – tell us the truth. Please don’t create an image in our minds which doesn’t exist in your brick and mortar building. We are tired of listening to such harangues of how your company is the best company, that its culture is forward looking and the growth in your company is fast-track. We are not interested in your multiple hours’ long presentation. All we want to know is the money that we will get for our efforts in your company, the role that you offer to us, how we grow in your company and about the culture. Please don’t bombast us with the data which we can get on the internet faster than you think.

So what can we conclude, employers?

My message is a call to action: Be aware of these attributes. Together, I hope we, your employees, and you, the employer, can forge an enduring partnership.