Of Employer and Employee

By Ramesh Tiwari

The Creator will not like His creation to be inferior. If the persons of high intellect could only make the world beautiful, He would not bother to create mediocrities. Since most things in the world can be done well by ordinary people, the larger part of humanity consists of them. Now the question arises whether a system that opposes this law can yield satisfactory results. If not, the policies of recruitment in our country is in need of review as they provide that the minimum education qualification should correspond closely to the position i.e. lower qualification for lower post but they aim at the candidates that come from the pool of highest intellectual capability for every capacity, ignoring the bigger group of average students. An average student is not responsible for his being average but rather it is God who made him a boy of middling talent. Why should he then be discriminated against? He can make a very good clerk and feed data into a computer or do repeat nature of the work more diligently than a quick-witted clerk would do – for an employee of high intellectual ability often avoid laborious and monotonous jobs. However, sharp minds cannot be ignored absolutely. There are certain jobs like decision-making, formulating policies etc that need accomplished persons and to promote higher performance in studies, it is necessary to select candidates of higher merits for higher positions.

Now in addition to a candidate’s qualification, his general behaviour is equally an important point that a selection committee should take into account.  It is often observed that a few gnomes have pretty negative attitudes and whizz-kids are prone to corruption whereas most ordinary minds are scrupulous and faithful. A genius may be eccentric or have negative approach in everything; consequently, he, for all his intellect, is useless at a job. Our top skilled workers make two groups: one of them carries every job off and the other cops out smoothly. The latter group are the components wrongly fitted and so shifting them to their correct slot is preferable to forcing them to work. A bad farm worker may be the best waiter. Often slackers are very clever because they know how to skip responsibilities. And on the contrary, the responsible and sincere feel the urgency of work and the need that one may be in. The former is selfish, cunning and unkind, but often makes a good manager. The latter is generous, sympathetic and helping and makes only a good worker. The group of dullards comprise of meek persons and the brains, of emotionally distressed. Accordingly, they are likely to represent serious hazard of adverse selection to an employer.

Since a recruitment process is not perfect unless it targets a suitable candidate out of the whole crowd of job seekers or provides opportunities to the candidates of every mental level, we need to conduct a detailed study of which sort of person best fits a particular profession.  So to decide a perfect eligibility criterion, we should first create a big database of resumes of all the employees working in different offices across the country with their day-to-day output of work and the quality of their performance. This database could then be used in sorting out those officials that are burden on the offices and also the nature of the best ones at different professions.

With the nation’s poverty-stricken underclass struggling for social justice, we cannot absolutely ignore reservation policy. The disabled as compared to other sort of the people from deprived areas are more deplorable and therefore required to be provided with adequate number of jobs. But in implementing such welfare reform legislation, great care should be taken to insure that no ineligible person takes the advantage of it, nor does the same family have the repeated benefit and in no situation the percentage of reservation exceeds thirty percent of number of jobs available – for negligence in checking corrupt practices may cause the real needy to lose his chance and the high inflow of unproductive employees may give rise to factionalism, make different groups have a rather incestuous relationship and finally hamper offices to render smooth services to the people.

Thus we come to the conclusion that recruitment process involves continuous study of human mind but to recruit appropriate employees is not the ultimate solution to every problem that an employer may have.  A structure of pay scales also has a lot to do with the performance of employees. Where too high salaries breed luxury and then impertinence; too low, irresponsibility. Unnecessary high salaries may disturb the financial situation of the government or the employer and ultimately get in the way of further recruitments. Low salaries at the same time may create a problem of retention and unrest among workers. Salary is a livelihood to every employee but it is also a tool in the hands of an employer which he can use to stimulate interest among his employees. The job of determining pay scales is as complicated as to set rules for recruitment because it too requires a database of varying living standards, depending on different levels of income. 

A long term clerk is the worst officer and therefore there should be no provision for a clerk to be promoted to an officer. The clerical cadres should also be divided into different grades and ranks so that clerks may have opportunities for promotion within their own class.

To allow too many leaves and holidays is against the interest of the institution, organisation or the concerning office every way. It not only causes the loss of work but also diverts the attention of the workers away from their duties. Usually, they get involved in some of their own business and thus their office work becomes a thing of secondary importance. Take government teachers, for example. They have long summer vacations and many other holidays throughout the year but they never give the same results as private teachers do. Even five day week is the worst concept in India considering the poor work culture here. However, extremely long working hours and very few days off, too, have bad effects on the efficiency of workers. They start feeling gloomy and turn mechanical instead of taking interest in their work. Some of them fall into depression and some develop negative attitudes. So while determining number of leaves and working hours, employers should take the middle course.

The staff regulation should be worker friendly, but no worker or supervisor of any position should be allowed any relaxation of disciplinary measures. A careless control is a serious disease of a system and causes the organisation to diminish. 

A good training course pre-empts many problems, so there should be a system whereby all sorts of employees and administrative staff must undergo regular training. Generally, we never try to consider the large experience that our retired officials develop during their service period. We can make the best use of that by employing such senior people to train the new generation of staff at various training centres. In so doing, we can not only save them from old age frustration but also purchase value-added services with the money that we spend on pension.

17 June 2014