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Survival of the toughest

What happens to personal relationships when cutthroat competition drives a work environment, asks BAGESHREE S.

ALL UPSIDE DOWN Be it work or play, dramatic shifts can leave you completely disoriented PHOTO: M.A. SRIRAM

There was a sense of order in her world when Shaila Sharma joined a multinational bank in the late 1980s. She worked for fixed hours, knew most of her customers personally, drew a fixed salary, and raises came periodically and to all employees.

It was in the late 1990s that the ground beneath Shaila's feet began to shift rather drastically. About three-fourths of the employees of the bank were sent home on VRS and a new and young workforce walked in.

This lot was not bound by the same service rules that once guided Shaila and her colleagues. "A major chunk of work was outsourced, and to keep pace with different time zones, the concept of working hours was done away with."

Benefits such as pension, medical aid were withdrawn and there was a "systematic education" by the management that saving up for old age or to meet exigencies such as ill health was something he/she had to take care of as a "responsible individual".

Shaila can hold forth on the tragedy of hard-won labour rights becoming defunct in the liberal economy. But what she misses at a more personal and emotional level is a sense of collective and camaraderie the old working order afforded her.

A million champagne bottles have already been opened to celebrate our "liberation" from the babu-style centralised work culture and our grand entry into the so-called open and democratic work structure that empowers and celebrates individual employees.

Psychological pressures

But there have been as many dissenting voices. Apart from the larger economic questions, they are talking more and more loudly about the psychological pressures, sense of alienation and rootlessness that the new work culture has ushered in.

One such eloquent voice is that of engineer Shankar Gopalakrishnan.

Unlike Shaila, he is a child of the liberal era. He may not have two distinct experiences to contrast, but that hasn't dimmed his analysis of what happens to relationships on the work floor in IT and BPO sectors, feted as the leading lights of the new economy.

What appraisal does

He cites the practice of individual appraisals and performance-based incentives as holding a mirror to the work and relationship dynamics.

"By giving `extraordinary benefits' to a few, and setting up a vast majority as those who have `not met with expectations', the company is creating a mathematical solution to a human resource issue," he says.

"The net result, as can be expected, is that one creates a very hungry environment, quite like a jungle ecosystem. But unlike in the jungle, the notion of `survival of the fittest' takes a different slant in the corporate world. So what is promoted as a new-age HR policy, the zero-fat, no-nonsense performance worship, is a step back into the bureaucratic era."

This can take ugly forms during "appraisal season". "A friend of mine stopped speaking to me because I got a better appraisal than him. I completely agreed with him that both of us should have been in the same grade, but he saw me as a culprit!

Shankar has found liberation from this dog-eat-dog situation by walking out of it to pursue his passion for writing.

But even those who are within this structure and accept intense competition as an inescapable part of life do recognise the havoc it can cause to personal relationships. Says Samir Bose, a content writer with a portal: "Interpersonal relationships get polarised, and sadly, the atmosphere that once thrived on collaboration and co-operation suddenly gets charged with feelings of needless animosity." At the end of the day, the burden is on the individual to prioritise and decide how much he cares for competition, he adds.

There has been a great deal of scholarly work on the implications of the new work culture on the emotional life of a workforce. These have taken a vast landmine of contradictions that govern the so-called corporate culture in their sweep — for instance, the simultaneous emphasis on individual excellence and teamwork; the doublespeak of flexitime and impossible project deadlines; the grand irony of offering fabulous salaries and recreational facilities even as work conditions afford them little time to use them.

In his book The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett makes an incisive study on how the work culture impacts not only our relationships at the workplace, but tells on a whole web of relationships down to those with our spouses and children.

He contrasts the lives of unskilled, migrant labourer Enrico and that of his son Rico who has achieved the American dream by becoming a management executive.

Rico is at once a "successful and confused man", who hardly knows what really are the enduring values he should pass on to his children.

Sennett's quest focusses on how relationships play themselves out when "chameleon values" define the economy even as we expect family and other relationships to be governed by trustworthiness, commitment and purpose.

In one particularly revealing emotional outburst, Rico tells the author: "You can't imagine how stupid I feel when I talk to my kids about commitment. It's an abstract virtue to them; they don't see it anywhere."

(Some names have been changed.)

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