My experience as the founder of a startup, web development services company was predated with 10+ years in academia and industry. In those years I experienced a lot of things which never felt great. Let me give an example inspite of working for a company over time and usually at night I was always expected to be either be present the next day at the usual ‘start time’. At one point in time I came back from an official trip carried out over the weekend (500 km from my residence). I reached back home at 4:30–5:00am and when I could not get up and reach at usual office hours I got a call and was asked to reach office. Similarly very dedicated teachers that I saw were given show cause notices for either not checking the examinations papers in time or not delivering quizzes in time. Please note the teachers were not assigned any Teaching Assistant or Grader given the class sizes were 50+ for each section ( each teacher teaching at least 3 sections per semester).
The above are just a sample (maybe a bit more similar) of when a company forces sincere employees to look for moving over to other opportunities. So when I got the opportunity to create a company culture I wanted it to be according to my vision based on my experiences. I won’t bore with the details but here are the salient features of some of the policies.
Some of these policies were changed especially number one later and there was an attendance register but it was never used for anything useful.
While these policies were criticised by almost everybody at one point or another, but I was amazed at how the employees themselves critcised them and forced me to put an attendance register. Similarly the leave policy was always scrutinised by the management team as well as the employees. The curious case of the employees who wanted to know the total number of leaves but also the breakup like medical, casual and annual leaves. Maybe it was because of the rigid rules elsewhere that forced the employees to ask these questions.
I think the above rules were able to cultivate the following impact.
Finally the task of an human resource department is to help the employees become better human instead of robots working under instructions.