People issues in Indian IT

Indian IT companies have been on recruitment spree for quite sometime. Because of global recession, may be recruitment has become a little bit slow but how about thinking a target of recruiting 25000 people in one year. You will go nuts…

Some of the biggest Indian software companies have been getting the huge contracts which span years of the relationship and say a billion dollar contract with the customer. IT offshoring has remained a biggest buzz for many of the multi-national companies as part of cost-cutting or to reduce their IT spending.

So when you recruit this amount of the people, quality of the people gets automatically compromised. Sometimes, it’s really difficult to find good managers. Major chunk of Indian IT companies are working on traditional models (say waterfall) and because of the situation I just mentioned, a lot of developers get promoted to their next roles say a module leader or Project Leader.

In my last blog I discussed why it’s important to groom these new module leaders, project managers to their new role. In this blog, I’ll discuss some of the human issues which are recurring and many of the new managers go nuts to deal€ with them. People who are experienced deal with these situations based on their own experiences. However they don’t have any structured way of dealing with these human issues.

Think about following problems and you will know that may be I am talking the problems in your own company.

• A person is not that efficient. He spends more time going to canteen or browsing internet than spending time on real work.
• People start making groups within a group. If they are not happy with the working of their supervisor sometimes they are not that cooperative with that supervisor. How to handle that situation?
• A person requires vacation. Either he didn’t inform you in time or you yourself don’t encourage people taking vacations.
• People have been working under stress for quite sometime (3 months-6 months continuously) for 12-14 hours on daily basis and because of the fault of the higher-management in estimating project, people are working nonstop without having any vacation. As a supervisor, you can’t afford in providing vacation to the people.
• People are not motivated enough because of the repeated sense of work. They have been working in the same project for last one year without significant change in their work. No structured way of compensating people in terms of money or building new competencies. People are demotivated a lot.
• Another example of demotivation may be – a person got promoted or sent for overseas assignment because of some wrong reasons and people already knew that there are better persons for that work. One way communication/centralized nature of management.
• There may be many people who don’t have the right skillsets because of many reasons. They are always told that what they are lacking in terms of skills but nobody gives a helping hand providing them directions to reach there. Here comes the role of mentorship.
• A newcomer joins a new company after leaving his previous organization. It may happen that you have altogether different working culture than his previous organization. It’s not fair to expect miracles from that person in terms of knowing all work ethics/culture you follow without telling him. Again here a mentor helps him come out clean in that process.

The list is not that exhaustive but I hope you might have got the idea. Based on experiences and research, if you list down human problems, you’ll know many of the problems are recurring in each project and each company. What I believe is, if the problems are recurring, there can be better solutions. As IT is driven with human resources, the productivity directly proportionates to the overall happiness people have in their life and work. If organizations start believing that they need a more structured approach to deal with human problems, you’ll find a great deal of self-motivated people, focused towards their work.