The backlash following EY employee Anna Sebastian Perayil’s death has highlighted how corporate India’s conditions can be deemed, in many cases, as being ‘inhumane’. Such conditions call attention to how Indian employees are among the most overworked in the world. It underlines two key questions:
Are Indian workplaces desirable?
Why are employees here overworked?
According to recruitment company PageGroup’s Michael Page Talent Trends 2023 survey report, 59% of the Asia-Pacific workforce is looking for new job opportunities. It brings out a big problem in Indian enterprises that points to the average Indian company being undesirable to work in.
In a 2023 survey by Harappa Insights, 58% of respondents mentioned leaving their jobs because of toxic bosses. The next generation is responding to the workplace culture through mass resignations and negative organisational reviews. A change in workplace culture is underway, and organisational leaders need to acknowledge it.Does this mean that Indian managers are terrible people? No. They are hardwired to be rigorous and ruthless. In the American police procedural TV series, The Rookie, a tough superior uses what he calls ‘Tim Tests’ – irrational exercises designed to stress out recruits into making mistakes – to gauge if they are worthy of passing the field training officer’s exam. This isn’t far from what happens in Indian companies.Most managers from top management institutes only hire from their alma mater and similar institutions because they are certain that the rigour of the programme will ensure that the fresh recruit can handle stress, irrespective of their skillset, interest area or passion towards the work. This is an institutional mindset. So, why do India’s top management programmes perpetuate this style of working?
In 1959, the Planning Commission collaborated with University of California to address difficulties in finding suitable managers for PSUs. They formulated a scheme to set up an All-India Institute of Management Studies. This led to the formation of the first three IIMs to create managers for PSUs.
This meant creating managers who could handle the pressure of working in large bureaucratic organisations with undefined organisational policies and processes. A flurry of private entities followed suit without updating the curriculum and pedagogy to reflect current times. Over 5,700 MBA institutes in India operate with the same modus operandi.
As highlighted in the report by the IIM Review Committee, 2008, not much has changed in the governance and pedagogy of IIMs. As a result, private universities that imitated IIMs haven’t evolved either. More than 3 lakh students apply for CAT, and thousands apply to MBA programmes.
Indian organisations are filled with MBA graduates who have been trained in 20th c. style of leadership.
What started as an endeavour to train managers for PSUs 65 years ago, has remained unchanged. What has changed are the aspirations of MBA graduates. How many MBA graduates today aspire to work in PSEs? And, yet, they are still trained as such.
So, is the problem with the institution that trains the leader? Or with the recruiter that determines the type of candidates they hire? London Business School prides itself as an institution that trains leaders who are going to overcome the big challenges of the world. IIM Ahmedabad’s focus as an institution is to create high-quality ‘talent’, among other things. The distinction in intent is clear from mission statements.
A 21st-century B-school needs to be more conscious than simply creating high-quality talent, unless it does not believe that the Indian market has evolved to be conscious, capable of discerning good education from bad, and able to tackle and grapple with the big ideas of the world.
