Punctuality Holiday Management Standardization Specialization

Punctuality everyday keeps overtime away!

As I try to understand, adapt and adjust to the American way of working, I remember my working days in India. I think of the number of hours I used to put in at work everyday. If I add the hours spent commuting, I figure I spent more than a major part of my life in the process of earning my livelihood! And I wonder if that is how it should be. Is that what is called ‘hard-working’ and ‘dedicated’? I know that most, if not all, my colleagues and friends worked the same way so it was not as if it was just me! My immediate superior always seemed to have something to prove to somebody upstairs and I remember clearly the lack of options I was given in helping him prove that, time and again! I was young then and thought that the only way of coming up in life was to take your sincerity, put it on a platter and offer it to your employer to use as he wished! Well, he did.

But here, things are different. Americans do not take advantage of your sincerity. That’s the main difference between Indian and American managers – Indians judge your performance on what you do after 5 pm (including the time you spend on your ‘salaams’ to them!) and always expect you to work after hours, preferably free of cost, and only then will they call you ‘hard working’ and ‘sincere’!

Americans, on the other hand, will not ever ask you to work late – for one, almost everybody is paid by the hour and so even if you work 15 minutes extra, you can legitimately charge overtime for 1 hour! That’s because many people have to take up one more part time job to survive, so sitting even 10 minutes late means reaching the other job late - and that will not be appreciated at all.

Secondly, the culture is just not that way – you are NOT expected to work even 1 minute extra for the company and you will be judged only on what you do between 8 and 5. Moreover, children are left in the care of babysitters during the day, especially if the couple is working. If they don’t reach home on time, they’ll probably have to pay double to the babysitter. Probably the babysitter herself also has another job to reach! Children under the age of 11 cannot be left alone at home as per the law – so babysitting is almost an industry! If you leave your child alone at home, you can be reported to the authorities and repeated offences can lead to your child being ‘confiscated’ by the state!

Even if the wife is a housewife, she expects the husband to come home on time and take care of the child and / or take care of household duties. Negligence can end up in divorce very easily! Wives cannot be treated here like they are in India! Incidentally, Americans do not like the word ‘housewife’– they prefer the word ‘homemaker’ instead. Going home on time to look after the children or other domestic work is considered every person’s right and duty and no boss will ask you to forsake your family life and sit late. If he does, he better have some real good reasons!

One more thing about these people – they are sticklers for time. Almost all of them get up by 5.30 am and reach office by 6.30 am! Especially in the small towns because they all come from farming family backgrounds where daily life starts with the sunlight. That way they are also able to leave at about 3.30 pm in order to reach the other job in time. So they come early and expect you to come in and leave on time. And they pay you by the hour so you’d better not be late!

So it’s all very logical and tied in very nicely, as you can see.

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Holiday management can compensate for lack of public holidays!

Monday, May 28 was Memorial Day on which dead people are remembered. These include family members, friends and even war victims. People go to cemeteries and place flowers and wreaths on loved ones’ graves and pray for their souls. It’s a very nice custom but like everything else, the media hypes it up too much, robbing it of its solemnity and people seem to have lost interest in the ritual.

Do you know that the US decides most of its holidays on the basis of the day of the week? Like, Memorial Day will always fall on the last Monday of May. Labor Day will fall on the first Monday of September and Thanksgiving will fall on the fourth Thursday and Friday of November.

I think it’s because the US has so few public holidays and vacation days that they always try to make a holiday fall on a Monday or Friday so they can have a long weekend! There are on an average only 7 to 10 public holidays depending on the state, and most people get only 2 weeks vacation time. So these long weekends provide some respite to the people.

One more insight into the practicality of American thinking — no ‘panchangs’ and moon sightings and all that, just plain practicality — you have to declare a holiday in the week, so you might as well declare what is most beneficial to the people.

But then, you can only be practical so much. Imagine doing this kind of holiday management in India. With so many festivals, holidays and sick leave and casual leave and privilege leave, life would become one long weekend and going to work as occasional as going on a picnic now!

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To stop imagination, use standardization!

Americans are great ‘standardizers’. They like to standardize everything, build models and stick to them. Sometimes this is a great advantage, like when it comes to automation, but sometimes its irritating and unimaginative. When a model or design or process is standardized, it helps in its automating it and that’s why America is so highly automated - from withdrawing money from an ATM to applying for credit or looking for driving directions or getting your car washed, the list goes on and on. But when it comes to having houses mass-produced with the same layout — now that’s really too much!

In most places, if you want to build a house, the architect will give you four or five standard designs in that city and you can choose only from them! I am not only talking about apartments but also of individual houses! You can make slight alterations but nothing material. Of course, this means you can buy your doors and windows readymade but who wants to have a home that is exactly like a thousand other homes in the city!

This kind of standardization saves enormously on costs and that is what America is all about — the bottom line! Homes are built in about 4 months time and you will normally only see about 2 people working on it at any one time. There is no contingent of laborers, no slum colony! Everything is readymade and needs to be just put together like a child’s building blocks! It’s all very well organized!

Look at the street names — most cities, even if they are next to each other, have a Main Street, a First Street, a Second Street and Washington Street! There are 8000 Main Streets in America, 10000 First Streets, 11000 Second Streets and 5000 Washington Streets! I can understand every big city having a Washington Street. But 5000?

Leave alone street names, even cities have same names — there are at least three of our own beloved Bloomingtons! And that led me to discover why in all the books I have read, city names are always mentioned with the state name, for example, Omaha, Nebraska. God knows how many Omahas are there in the US so you’d better specify which one you are talking about! Americans tend to specify the state when they speak or write of a city.

But look at what America has achieved in the area of housing. Standardization may be frustrating in certain ways, but it has kept costs down by keeping time, material and effort (labor) costs low. This combined with organized credit facilities has been brought within the reach of the common citizen. Buying a house is now just another step you take in life, not that once-in-a-lifetime dream that Indians cherish and struggle all their lives, many times without success, to realize.

If one can bring housing to the common man, rich or poor, who wouldn’t welcome some standardization!

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Specialization as a solution to unemployment!

This is a nation of specialists. You have specialists for everything whether its home construction, IT, medicine, banking, anything at all. This probably derives from the American tendency to break goods into standardized components and split every service area into a neat process. To have a process its necessary for you to break the service into smaller activities. And once you have small activities you can build your expertise on one or more of them. For example, you can have a doctor for a single bone in your ear. He will know everything there is to know about this bone but ask him something about something a millimeter away and he will refer you to another specialist! But mind, he will be an absolute expert on that bone.

There is a definite implication to this kind of specialization — because you might need more than one person to do most things, it also means as a corollary, that more people need to be employed to each service. For example, to pull out the weeds in your compound — this has been witnessed by me personally — requires three people — one to pull out the weeds, one to hold the garbage can into which the former throws the weeds pulled out an three, to spray something on some weeds that cannot or need not be pulled out! And who is employed to do this — college boys and girls! They have probably been shown pictures of the weeks they should pull out and they will do just that; they do not know even the name of weed but they will pull them out with absolute efficiency! Expand this to a macro level. This entire country needs to employ more people to do its daily stuff!

And that is why unemployment is so low. Can you imagine how many people will be involved in the life cycle of a project? Like, you can have a project planner but he will only plan, not track, so you need a person to track the activities in the plan! That’s two people employed in the place of one!

Also refer to my earlier ideas about overtime. If I cannot complete building a wall by 4 pm then employ one more - since I won’t stay after 4pm and you won’t pay me overtime! Multiply that by the working population size of this country and you will understand why unemployment is around 5%. And this is supposed to be a weak economy!

Now take India for instance. There you have to work late, overtime or not. Your manager needs to deliver to his manager so he’s making you do three people’s jobs. You are the project manager, the project planner and the tracker! If you insist on doing only your job, you’re a goner, unless you’ve got some Godfather in place. Net result? Two other people are unemployed and you have a national unemployment rate of 66%!!!!

Look, I’m not saying all this specialization is fantastic and the miracle solution for all ills. For one, in this place to get anything done, you have to meet three other people. And to get a medical problem solved, you will end up seeing a host of doctors and paying each of them. For example, you will pay the specialist who suggests the X-Ray, the technician who takes the X-Ray and the Radiologist who looks at the X-Ray and then the clinic that gets the damn report typed! All this makes the whole process take a long time and make a deep cut into your wallet! A whole lot of things in this chain are automated but the benefits of that automation are lost because so many people are involved. No wonder medical costs are so high! And you need insurance to cover those costs — without insurance, you cannot dream of surviving one month here!

There is another aspect to this specialization. Because you are just a small cog in the wheel, you also become as dispensable or rather, replaceable. You may be an absolute master at what you do but always bear in mind that the area where you exercise this expertise is very small within the grand scheme of things. And because each person’s job area is small he can be replaced or some other person easily trained to take his place. So what happens when your skills are replaceable? You get paid less for them! That is why American salaries are low. The salary budget gets spread over a larger number of people. Another corollary to this: notice periods are very less, never over a couple of weeks. Most companies can afford to let you go in a day because you are just a replaceable cog! The break down of components and services into smaller parts and processes reduces over dependency on any one part.

In India, because each person has so much responsibility thrust on them or is involved in so many things that the management feels insecure about even letting the lowest peon go. Which is why we have notice periods of 3 months in some Indian companies!

But think of the other implications of such a corporate culture. When you are a just another cog in the wheel and are treated as such, what is going to be the level of your loyalty to the wheel? If not this wheel, then that wheel! Precisely! I’ll go wherever this cog is needed! Which is why you see people changing jobs so rapidly. America is often characterized a country with a moving population, Naturally. Everybody’s moving where their jobs take them. Nobody expects any loyalty to the company — you see a better opportunity, you jump. Because you know that’s what your company will make you do anyway once you have outlived your cog life, you do the same.

But now you know the secret of the US unemployment rates!

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