Every analyzed how most of us seem to spend the day ? The typical IT geek comes to work at 8.30 am and without further ado gets into the outlook, followed by quick bursts of catching up with yahoo, rediff, Indiatimes whatever. Then it’s a nice little wait till chai time and breakfast and catching up with people. Before any constructive work begins, an hour has already gone by. You are busy settling down on the system and before you realize it, hey, its coffee time and time to catch up with friends on the phone. In between high quality stuff on the computer, mail refreshes are mandatory every few minutes, an art honed to perfection. And no days complete without forwarding nice stuff to about 20 friends. Sound’s familiar? So what, says the geek. “I finish my work on time and do it well too. My boss doesn’t mind either and man, wake up, we are in the 21st Century in a booming market and my skills are worth more than you pay me”.
Oh really ?
Cut back to the year 2000. The dotnet dream had crashed and amidst swanky wheels and heavy EMIs, a typical day at work for many IT professionals was spent looking out anxiously for HR people lurking around with the dreaded pink slip. You can bet forwarding emails and having a nice time was the last
thing on anyone’s minds. Cut back to an earlier generation, when there used to be scarcity of jobs and a flurry of applications for a single opening.
So is there a lesson out here ? Obsoletion and being downgraded comes faster here than probably most industries. What’s hot and happening today can go forever tomorrow. We have had so many ERP consultants in other technologies who’s market values have virtually gone today. Being at the right time at the right place turned into being in the wrong time in a disaster.
In this scenario, the only thing that remains constant and will never let one down is a dedication towards work and a enhanced appetite for knowledge upgradation. No matter what the extraneous factors are, and that includes your boss, your peers, your pay package, your project, the perceived unfairness of the system, one has to be internally driven. In world class organizations, viability of an employee means getting at least 5 times the return on investment on the resource. If you aren’t, better start getting worried. A 12-hour workday wouldn’t probably be enough to meet this benchmark. So, better start thinking twice before wasting your time on trivialities. The ones who are going to last are the ones who continuously set personal benchmarks and strive to deliver value to the organization and oneself, instead of waiting for the organizational diktat’s or checking out whether the boss is watching. Just remember, at the end of the day, one chooses to work in an organization on pre-agreed terms and no matter where you work, the trick is treating your job as the greatest in the world at the moment and treating imperfections that come with it as part of the package. And that is the secret to high creativity and world class deliveries.
Maybe once in way, we all need to learn to thank our stars for the opportunities given and take it on from there.
