In the current difficult macro conditions, if you are trying to optimise headcount or costs and certain employees resign en-masse should you feel a sense of relief? You may be tempted to unless it’s the women workforce you recruited and nurtured with great care and enormous struggles. If the back-to-office call is fair for employers like TCS, isn’t it equally fair for its women staffers to quit in protest? If austerity is considered fair for the employer, then expecting immediate rewards is equally a fair ask by employees. Should we say the employer-employee relationship is a ‘marriage of convenience’ to begin with? Neither party is truly, madly, deeply in love forever!

We can’t help but blame either the employer or the employee depending on the trending complexity at workplaces. Just about a year ago, we were upset about employees moonlighting or demanding crazy salary hikes or ghosting job offers. Now we are accusing employers of insensitivity for mandating a return to office.

Strained Relationship

“India is still an employer’s market” texted my CHRO friend when I asked him to comment about many large enterprises’ latest return to office diktats. I couldn’t agree with his employer’s market judgement as most large IT services companies have reported 20 per cent plus attrition in their latest quarterly results. If 40 per cent of your organisation is in transition through joiners and leavers every quarter, no employer can claim to be in control.

Picture this paradox. Not too long ago, quite a few enterprises were desperately dishing out 50-100 per cent salary hikes and joining bonuses to attract and retain niche talent. Cut to the present, The current hiring market sentiment is the lowest in the last 36 months. Even then, we saw TCS reporting a higher attrition rate among women with the return to office as a possible explanation. Over the last decade, large enterprises have always paid recruiters like us a premium for hiring women. So, what caused the change of heart for some of the established employers to invoke work policies that trigger attrition?

Mea Culpa employee?

Should we point out that employees haven’t returned the favour of some of the benevolent work practices of employers? Think about all the benefits provided during the pandemic? Remote work, handsome increments, incentives, and infrastructure boost at home to enable WFH. In return, what did employers get? Several employers point to higher attrition, moonlighting, limited collaboration, reduced innovation, inflated wage bills and questionable productivity.

Where the employer erred

On the other hand, some employers got ahead of themselves and stated that remote working is a silver bullet to the future of work. Many ESG experts even talked about the carbon footprint reduction opportunity on the planet due to WFH and how remote working would be a boon for the women workforce and enable a higher female participation ratio. Statistically speaking, this did happen. For example, the top 5 Indian IT Services Bellwethers registered a 44 per cent growth in total Women Workforce since the pandemic. The comparative Male Workforce growth for the period is 40 per cent. But somewhere work practices had to go beyond hiring as WFH also burdened the families with unrestrained work hours. In an Even Stevens game, the real estate savings went to the company coffers and the employees too saved their commute and travel costs and many rated their employers as best places to work. Let’s say there were no favours done.

Esoteric Expectations?

Eighty two percent of employees polled by Gartner in the 2021 EVP Employee survey wanted their organisations to see them as people not as employees. But during the same time employees were asking for humongous hikes to stay back, trading multiple job offers, refusing to return to office and breaking the very pact of treating their own employers in equal terms. The newfound anonymous freedom of rating down employers via Glassdoor, LinkedIn and other similar platforms has also percolated internally in new forms of entitlement. “I got the same bonus as my peer, but I had complex clients, who were more challenging” complained my peeved client manager. Employees expecting their personal or professional context to be considered during performance appraisal is also an unusual predicament for today’s managers. “After 3 years of WFH, I need a dedicated cabin for myself to operate from the office” demanded another colleague. I heard him in disbelief imagining the cost of a future office full of cabins rather than collaborative open spaces.

2021 was the employee’s big year and since the second half of 2022 till date, the employers are getting stricter by the day. The ability of both to judge what’s right and what’s not is at its lowest.

Current adversities and uncertainties at the workplace and the market at large are all our collective creations. On balance, I would still say Mea Culpa Employer!

(Kamal Karanth is co-founder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing firm)