Covid begining: Let us go back to the initial covid days. There was a chaos of this new viral fever; everyone was running for their lives to their native places from Bangalore. Everyone was worried about their future and their businesses.
Real estate, small businesses and the IT companies were hit badly as they needed to quickly adapt to this change. The latter did well in handling this by allowing its employees to do work from home / connect remotely. They started to push their employees to toil and kind of inflicted that, the work from home is a natural phenomenon and greatly started convincing that in future this would be the norm.
Most impacted were the local businesses, real estate and almost everyone who worked for daily wages. Whereas for IT employees, this was a new thing which they wanted to adapt working remotely. No traffic chaos and importantly they started to save big on their daily expenses. This was a loss to the government where in the flow of indirect taxes was hit majorly with the drop in money transactions.
Moonlighting : Few of the employees found a new way to increase their income by starting their own businesses or working simultaneously for other companies or as a freelancer.
Post Covid dilemma: With the success of vaccination and the central government effectively handling Covid, there was a dilemma in everyone's mind that whether to return to the pre-covid days or to continue the good WFH culture? Even IT companies were saving lots of cash in terms of rent and maintenance at that time.
With the savings, most percentage of employees were able to invest their money in land/new house or in buying a new vehicle. It was a blessing in disguise that they were able to meet and stay with their parents / family during covid.
Kids schooling was happening through mobile phones and now every parents or most of them wanted their children to attend the schools to meet up with their friends/classmates in order to improve socially. But, on the other hand, they wanted to continue to work remotely, may be to continue with their side businesses (if any) and mainly to avoid the traffic / commuting problems and to save on additional expenses.
2023 August: Most IT companies have mandated RTO - return to office and started forcing employees to come to office atleast 3 days a week (Hybrid Model). The same employees who were helping during a major pandemic efficiently are now being asked to prove their efficiency! This is mainly due to the diminished visibility on what exactly an employee was doing and to stop moon lighting. There could be some enforcement from the state government too in order to improve the small businesses and cash flow.
What's going wrong? : Employees trust in the IT companies is greatly diminishing with the change in their interactions and enforcement of RTO.
Promotions are being stopped, employees are being asked to upskill by taking up external certification or else being threatened to get their variable pay cut.
This also has opened the door for job change. Attrition has increased, rather than that, the mindset of that attachment with the employer is being affected now for the IT companies, more than anything.
One time bonus or may be a timely hike or issuing promotions to those who deserve might bring back the internal rapport for sure in this greedy world, but you know currently the situation is bad.
From an employee perspective: Employees have to face the traffic issues in their daily commute to office which was not the situation when they were doing WFH. It's human tendency to get frustrated because one obviously feels why he or she needs to go through this on a daily basis when he or she can provide the same sort of service from home connecting remotely! And it's not the only issue they are going through now!
Demand for Housing: With the IT companies enforcing strict RTO, the rents have gone very high. A small one BHK with 600sqft area costs you 10k-12k or even more now a days in Bangalore. 2BHK is churning more than or close to 20k now. Huge demand for housing has made average earning employees concerned. They are not ready to pay such a huge rent. The rent in July being 13k is now valued at 20k is a huge concern for the tenants who have not seen 20% hike in the last 2 years!
Expenses on everything is on a higher side and employees are not getting paid well by their companies - this is another pandemic like mental trauma most IT people are facing currently.
IT companies are looking for young blood and those who have the right skills or experience are being pushed to the corner by not providing any help for their above issues. Forget hike or promotion, they are being asked to prove their worth indirectly.
If this situation continues, Organisations start to lose its trust of it's own employees and force itself into it's downfall. Management has to take firm steps in controlling this and have to understand that RTO is no more a solution now for everything.
Final words: It is important for a company to keep it's employees trust. A wrong foot can mark its downfall in the market. Life is a struggle, employees should not feel this while working for their company. Time fleets and doesn't wait for something to happen.
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