Work Performance is a Double Humped Curve
Introduction Grandchildren and the grandparents make a great pair except that there is this small hindrance that come in between them, in the form of parents. It is not difficult to guess why this is so. It is primarily to do with the "time at hand". While the "grand's" have a lot of time at hand, the parents in between are the greatly cursed for time. The overall problem, there is always a "parent-children"; "parent-grandparents" incompatibility and friction.
What is this to do with the work? Well, the "child-parent-grandparent" relationship and tussle follows almost like a shadow into the professional work environment.
Generic People Performance:
A persons performance is a double humped curve. If we were to plot the
performance of a person as a function of his age, it turns out that it
is a double humped curve, atleast in the Indian context! Soon after
college when he joins an enterprise, he is bubbling with energy and has
all the time in the world and is focused on work; as he grows in the
job, he is likely to get married, a dip in his performance (spend time
with his better half), a little down the time lane, children into the
family, further dip in the performance and this continues till the kids
get to college, when the performance increases because there is not much
work to do at home and the performance dip only with the onset of
superannuation. See the figure below that depicts this!
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| Performance as a function of time of a person. |
The Enterprise Problem:
Consider a conventional work place of yesteryears (things have changed
with young enterpruners appearing on the scene). A student who finishes
his degree (for the sake of argument - Engineering) enters into an
organization, call him a fresher. In all probability he is assigned to a
project which is being day to day managed by a mid-level manager (Mid
Manager), who in turn reports to a senior manager. For day to day
interaction, it is between the fresher and the mid-level manager (the
hump and the trough) and between the mid-level manager and the senior
manager (a trough and the hump). Clearly, this is the parent (mid-level
manager) sandwiched between the fresher and the senior manager, along
the lines of the "child-parent-grandparent" relationship. The source of
the problem is the time and or the lack of it.
While
the fresher and the senior manager, albeit for different reasons, are
flushed with time, the mid manage is slashed of time. And fundamentally
there is a mismatch when we put the mid manage to interact with folks
flushed with time in terms of amount of time that they have at hand. The
best solution is to put the freshers with the seniors, atleast on the
time front they are in sync. This might lead to a different kind of a
situations and questions? Questions like what do we do with the mid
managers?
But then that is a different story :-)
Comments
(sadly no instrument to like/express emotions in blogpost except comment.)