The drastic downfall of the market has become the talk of the town, sensex, inflation, job cuts, cost cutting are just few jargons you hear each day in the workplace. Scary mails floating around about hundreds of job cuts in this company or that company. My office is no different everyone is holding on to their dear jobs, though our senior managers have assured that wouldnot be a threat and I have not seen myself any layoffs "yet", but what we have noticed is a big time cost cutting some subtle and some can't-be-missed.
Things that affect us day-to-day, for eg, the soft drink vending machine in the cafeteria has been out of order for a fortnight and the refridgerators are not replenished with new coke cans quickly. They are aggressive in letting employee-travels, there was a hulla made when I had to travel which was anyway duly taken care by my manager stating I was indispensable (hehee!!) and I needed to travel. It was only to Chennai and Pune and not even out of country and there was so much fuss. I am still yet to get a reimbursement, till then I am gonna be a bit skeptical. We are still skeptical about the bonus and the salary rise that we are to get starting this month. Best performance awards generally monetary have been slashed down, you have to be truly genius to get one those these days.
Recently I was asked to be a mobile worker(meaning work out of any office) and give up my cubicle, coz there has been a shortage of workspace and the company is not ready to invest into buildings, atleast for now.
A new policy was pulled out early this week, which mandates all US and Canada employees to take casual leaves the last week of December, and the offices will be shut for the whole week, thus saving the power, employee transports and so on. It is being tried hard to implement the same in India too. Come to think of it, it affects people like me the most, the ones who dont have any plans for the New Year's, what am I supposed to do sitting home for a week? I will be doomed and the worst is yet to come.
