Monday Morning Blues to Monday Morning Sunshine: Is Changing Your Approach to Work an Answer?

‘You wake up in the morning and look out of the window, blurry eyed but hopeful, ready to welcome a new day, take on the challenges that it has to throw at you, wanting to stand up and be counted’.

This description would have probably resonated most with you when you were young and clueless. The ruthless world of working people had not depleted your enthusiasm and the cynical side of your brain had probably not developed. But as you grow up, things start changing, the pressure to pay the EMI’s, meet the sales targets and please your boss, takes away all the charm and promise that everyday used to hold. The pall of gloom of a Monday morning starts clouding your Sunday evening and eventually you go to bed cribbing and complaining about beginning of another week at the office.

I am sure not every one of us feels this way and there are many of us out there who simply love their jobs and cannot wait for the week to begin. But why is it that such lucky people are so far and between. Why is it that the hope and promise of youth is replaced by cynicism and distrust as we step in to our workplace? Where we spend close to 80% of awake hours every day.  Just imagine, you spend more than 40 hours each week, 160+ hours every month at your workplace and most of it is spent harboring negative emotions. Thinking and complaining about things that never go right, colleagues who are trying to pull you down and a boss who does not appreciate you.

What if there was a way to reverse this trend and start everything over? What is it that you would want to change? Think about the things that are in your control, don’t try and enlist stuff that you practically cannot do anything about, stuff like corporate policies or your ‘not so nice’ boss.  Things that were in your control, like changing the way you approach your work, prioritizing stuff in your personal life, treating everyone the way you would like to be treated etc. Basically simple things which all of us were taught when we were young but we somehow forgot all of those, the basic ingredients of a living a good life- simple values like- respect, integrity, and honesty.

While these are the basic ingredients that I think could help transform my work life, do share your thoughts on the basic ingredients that you think could help make your work life better.  Help you in changing the Monday morning blues to Monday morning sunshine…

Global Standards for HR: Are We Missing Something?

Standards may be defined as a set of rules. Rules that determine how certain people would behave in certain situations. Rules and predictability go hand in hand and predict the behavior of individuals in given situations. They also act as a means of classifying people into categories- as those who follow certain standards and those who don’t.  Recently I read this piece on tlnt.com on approval by ISO to create Global HR Standards. This acceptance got me thinking on how feasible it will be for ISO or any other such body to create universally applicable standards for a domain as socially constructed as Human Resources (HR) and what it would mean for organizations adopting these standards.

Much like the Fair Trade standards governing the procurement of coffee or the fair labor practices standards, most standards are created by voluntary bodies and are free for adoption or rejection by the larger audience for which it has been designed.  Also, standards can be created by anyone and it’s the adoption of it that determines its success. In effect there could be numerous available standards whose success would be determined by the willingness of organizations to adopt them.

Unlike the organizational rules which are backed by a hierarchical authority to ensure their adoption, standards have to rely on other means of adoption.  A standardizing authority may use scientific evidence as a means to highlight how the standard created by it is backed by science and hence warrants an adoption. ANSI (American National Standards Institute) will be developing standards for global HR and how effective they will be in convincing organizations on the scientific validity of their measures beyond statistical correlations would be interesting to see.

Additionally, a standardizing agent may try and create an elite identity around the followers of its standards and thus encourage active membership.  Most organizations are forever attempting to differentiate themselves from their competitors in the hope of attracting the brightest and the best talent. While following a global standard and benchmarking of performance may please the analytical side but I have my reservations on the kind of usefulness that such global standards could offer in terms of actual improvements on the ground. Unless this is actually backed by active nurturing by corporates which would mean active sharing of best practices and in turn a perceived threat to the pursuit of uniqueness that I earlier referred to.

Furthermore, standardizers may actually involve certain organizations in the design stage and the power equations at the design stage could determine the final shape of the standards as and when they emerge. This could in effect mean standards would mirror the practices of a few, with the expectation of making them applicable for a larger audience. This could actually undermine the creativity in practices and may actually encourage firms to look more like the powerful elite who created the standard in the first place.

I am not against a globally accepted measure on the cost of hiring or the heads to account for while calculating it, but my point here is to highlight how in our effort to standardize we may be turning a blind eye to certain realities which could have a bearing on how our organizations may look like in future.  My two cents on this would be for organizations to assess their existing systems, account for their own realities, outline their future outlook and then determine the relevance of these standards in their own context. Our organizations are loaded with numbers and standards to follow and it may be wise to take an informed call before deciding to add to this long list of numbers we track.