ARE IT Employees Satisfied ?

OR How to manage Work-Life Balance in IT Employees?

All the IT companies are businesses. You are a Human Resource, you get paid for
you skills. In support of this, opening statement I would like to draw the attention of my
thoughtful readers of Hitavada of India and abroad about the world’s most highly paid
luxurious (so called) employees and their work-life balance and quality of work life with
respect to their personal and professional lives in this article.
I have keenly analysed two interesting blogs on net about how the work-life balance can be
managed among employees working in IT Industries. One from John Winsent who is Data
Analyst, Motivational Speaker, Blogger at HCL Technologies. He has stated that there
can be plenty of reasons for one to change a job. Some of them are:

 Dissatisfaction with Salary

 Unpleasant Work Environment
 No Future Scope
 No Work-life Balance
This initiates the scope for me to enlighten the need of the hour as a die-heart management
educator since 1999. What I tried to draw out and understand, the reasons of not having the
work-life balance in IT sector- those are specifically : working late hours, chasing strict
deadlines, and not being able to devote much time to family disturbs the work-life
balance of an employee. Apparently this is the second major reason behind switching
firms in India. My own studies on Quality of Work Life among Indian Industries (my
Ph.D. topic for research, unfortunately could complete due to unavoidable
circumstances) interpretations like - Salary has no correlation with the time and
labor you put into your job. On the contrary, the less experienced engineers with lower
wages tend to slog more in the early days of their career. Working environment can
adjusted in accordance to the habitual actions of the working personnel. While high
strong need of achievement motivation enunciated via applied theory by David Mc
Clelland (1961) which was the part and parcel rather an extended version of Maslow’s
Need Hierarchy Theory (1943) by Abraham Maslow explains the need of future growth
due the urge of high ambition fulfillment or self-fulfillment needs (B-needs) and most
governing factors - internal cut throat competition and dirty politics among colleagues
and superiors-subordinates unhealthy relationships. These all result into a common
problem among employees working IT sector in particular is Work-Life Imbalance.

The Supervisor who manages you works on the motto “Work needs to be done”, no
matter who does it. She/He doesn’t assign you tasks based on your salary. Yes, there is
initial assignment of user stories/features/sub-tasks but those with higher salaries do
not necessarily are assigned more(challenging/complex) tasks. When emergency hits
your product in the production, it is not the one who gets paid more becomes saviour
but the one who has some connection with the piece of code is assigned the task of
firefighting. If you think “those meetings” can be categorised as work, then yes, they
increase proportionally to your salary and seriously affect your work life balance. About
this query on how to cope up the balance, one ardent blogger from IT sector answered:
“I have worked for 5 companies of all sorts in about 6 years. I am not sure why you
chose 10 LPA as a pivot to ask this question. Maybe it provides the standard of living
you expect or may be you feel that work-life balance gets skewed over this”.

So, to sum up the discussion (for the sake of future development on this topic) the best
way to cope up with this situation and manage the balance between the personal and
professional life to an unrecognised and helpless IT employee will be:

 Don’t be available all the time. Respect your time and use it wisely. At the
end of the day, IT is just mental labor. Instead of working too hard on your
office tasks, work on side projects with latest fad.
 Learn to say NO..!!! as soon as possible. You are hired for X job there is no
Noble Prize for sweating, tormenting and finishing Y job.
 Pick up the work that is easier to do and has wider impact. Don’t take it in a
wrong way. Let me explain, there is no glory in wasting time in doing a complex
task in the technology that is already obsolete. Most of the established
companies have backed products which are written in older stacks, which have
ZERO demand in job market. So, does it make sense to waste your precious
hour in digging it?
 Don’t be an emotional jerk. You are laid off when economics is not in favour.
Learn economics, learn skills that are in demand. Spend that extra hour and
extra dollar in honing the skill which are in demand.

Article Submitted by

Bhushan R. Bonde, Principal Shirdi Sai Public School, Mouda (Dist. Nagpur) and can be reached at
sspsmprincipal@gmail.com.

Note: Dear Dr. Phanshikar Sir, I have got a pleasure to work with you as Sub-Editor in 2017 (for three
months) with you all. It was an wonderful experience in my life till now. Though left Hitavada due to my
physical problems. Kindly, publish the article if you find it worthy (to some extent). Will also contribute
my articles on the topics relating to education (school,colleges, business management specially
oranisation behavior and economics education, IT and other corporate fields). Thanks…all. Happy Diwali.