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The Worst Employers

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DQI Bureau
New Update

On what basis do people rate their place of work? Is it salary, is it job

challenge, is it operational freedom, is it the office environment, or is it the

name and fame the company has? I guess it is a combination of everything.

Considering that companies are competing with each other to get the best people,

and more professional handling of HR practices is happening, it will be safe to

state that overall, the satisfaction level of employees is going up. The latest

Best Employers Survey (BES 2004) is an indicator of that.

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So what is it that makes a company the 'worst company' to work for. Going

by BES '04, there are some parameters on which the employees have rated their

company much lower other parameters. Training is one of them. On all matters

related to training- duration, quality, relevance to job-almost 40%

respondents have shown unhappiness. Clearly, training is one need, which is not

being adequately addressed by the industry. Employers who ignore this, will not

be seen as the best employers.

IBRAHIM

AHMAD
In future a lot of companies will move up and down the BES 20 ladder, depending on how they handled appraisal systems and their employees' expectations from appraisal systems

The other area is the appraisal system, where only 55% employees seem to be

very satisfied. They believe that appraisal systems and processes need to

improve in terms of being transparent, fair, and well thought out. Appraisal

system is therefore another strong need in the industry that needs urgent

attention. And in future, a lot of companies will move up and down the BES 20

ladder, depending on how they handled appraisal systems and their employees'

expectations from appraisal systems.

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Survey results on salaries, salary hikes, and perks was a completely

different story altogether, with almost 55% employees being unhappy. It could be

argued that salaries and perks will always score low in such survey, but in BES

2004 almost 50% of employees are not very satisfied. Another issue, where quite

a few employees feel that their company is not doing enough is in terms of 'giving

back to society and undertake social work initiatives'. In fact, this is a

well known fact that very few companies do take up such initiatives; but now it

seems that their employees are noticing this, and rating them. However, I will

like to ignore these factors, and focus on training and appraisal systems.

Training is seen by employees as a perk from the company. They also believe

that the company is imparting training to really enhance their skills and

productivity. And most importantly they believe that training will help them

grow-either within the organization or outside-both in terms of job role as

well as salary. All these things will make the employee respect the company they

work for, more.

Similarly, if the appraisal systems are not very well defined and

transparent, the employees very often have this tendency to feel that their

monetary compensation was not commensurate with the work they had put in. He is

not able to clearly match the hikes or rewards that he got for his work. That is

why dissatisfaction with salaries goes up.

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My honest belief is that if training and appraisal system issues are

addressed; employee dissatisfaction with compensation will automatically come

down. And their respect for employers will go up.

Besides these factors, what is going to put companies under more pressure

will be non- participation in such surveys. Though BES 2004 survey questions

were sent to the top 200 Indian IT companies, including hardware and software,

the response was not too good. Only 40 responded. Employees of the remaining

companies should ask their employers why did they not participate. What was the

problem? In fact, we have already got two calls from seniors asking "can

anything be done now" and from about eleven middle and junior level people

asking me why their company does not figure in the survey. I bluntly asked them

to contact their HR chief for details. And figure out if their company is the

best employer or the worst employer.

The author is Editor of Dataquest IBRAHIM

AHMAD

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