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Tuesday, September 12

Live Work Play

The new BusinessWeek, Sep 18 cover-story talks about the best places to work. It also talks about what makes the Gen Y or the Millennial worker happy.
Here are the 6 best practices from the issue:
1. Don't hype your company to the future employee. The 1 hour power-pointed hype can wither in 5 minutes on Orkut and MySpace or on Google Talk. Hype sucks!
2. After a point more money has diminishing returns. Gen Y wants more life. Well all of us...Be liberal with chutti!
3. Gen Y are knowledge workers. They can think anywhere. Companies should not chain them to clocks. They love to work but on their terms and rhythm!
4. For Gen Y risk and responsibility appetite alone must decide the size and challenge of projects given to them. Not the title or the number of years of experience alone.
5. Give back feedback. Remember it's a knowledge economy we work in. Students need guidance and constant learning not just control and reward.
6. Giving back matters. Work does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in society. Employers must create purpose. Gen Y must have the time to give back to the city, to the old age home in the neighbourhood, to some cause, any cause beyond the corporate cause...

If your current company is doing these, give 1 point to every Q and score your employer. So how does your company score?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the 6 point would only look good on Paper but can never be followed bcoz of the Competiton that exisits amongst us.
With Companies fighting it out to survive and people ready to work at any cost and any time I don`t think that all the 6 pointers would ever be achieved in any Company.
I am not being negative but seeing that these pracices being published every now and then and each Company stating that we try to follow each of them but when u sneak into tose Companies u will find that it is the same as each Company does.
We don`t want to lose Business and for that we don`t mind pushing our employees to that level and if we find that they ain`t performing then there are others waiting in the line who would do what u want at ur terms and conditions.
its a matter of SURVIVAL in this wicked Corporate World.

Unknown said...

dear anonymous:-)
I agree in the real world there are few companies with a 6/6 cred! At least in the media sphere. But 4/6 is better than 2/6 and 0/6. Change takes time. Maybe when you become a boss, be aware of this score-card. Nothing stops you from (a)learning,(b)grabbing a more challenging assignment. If you are smart, you can get a mentor as well...Change takes time, effort, dogged determination. But it happens in the end. Keep the faith is all I can say with my years of experience. Cheers...

Anonymous said...

completely with you on this one, mr sinha. takes me back to one of my favorite hollywood movies on HOPE (btw, it has always been a recurrent theme in the world of art.

quoting the protagnist Andy from the movie, "Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And a good thing never dies."

Anonymous said...

btw, the movies name is (ie if you havent gussed it yet) "The Shawshank Redemption"

Anonymous said...

Companies run by the kind of philosophy 'anonymous' describes as ideal breeds unhappy employees. When unhappy, one can not possibly be productive.

Attrition rates are a huge problem that companies particulary in advertising industries have to tackle with.

Clients don't like to constantly have to meet new faces to interact with. It reflects badly on the company.

Some of the most successful companies in the world works on the sole principal of keeping employees happy.

Google is one of them.

The trick is if your employees are happy, they will care as much for the company as you do.

Mr. anonymous is right. Its a matter of survival. That is exactly why THESE practices are being published every now and then.

Anonymous said...

Nice post. I've personally liked most of the stuff that gets onto the BW features - some fairly topical stuff there

Your post also got me thinking about a Dan Wieden speech. In many ways, the internal health, so to speak, reflects in the work. Good enough reason to follow the 6-pointer.

Would love to hear your pov on other learning organisation tips. What do you chaps at david do to energise/infuse thinking?

Unknown said...

thanks harshal...the dan speech was quite inspirational! keep sending those links!!