Not Being Sarkari

 GAP has just implemented work from home culture in its organization. Yes, employees can work anywhere, anytime as long they doing there work. This is quite common in IT companies in India but rest of the sectors are alien to this concept.  We all have observed for decades that how sarkari babus used to run out of office (in case they are in office) as soon as clock struck 5:00 pm. Government teachers come out of their schools faster than kids. Running out of office, is not a characterstic of Government employees only. One can spot numerous (young and old alike) employees coming out of their offices like herd of cattle which is freed after hours of tying up. When I see such acts of hurry, few questions that come to my mind - Is presence everything? Is presence a direct measure of productivity? Is work-life balance in employee's life is important for an employer? GAP is doing this because they want to fare better on employee enagagement. GAP is doing this because they want proper work-life balance to be maintained in employees' life. GAP is doing this because they believe that productivity has nothing to do with presence. All that matters is 'getting the work done'.  A lot of Indian companies fail to fix measureable goals for their employees. Without goals, measuring performance is difficult, if not impossible. In order to score good in appraisal, presence of employees in office campuses becomes critical for an employee as attendance is at times the only goal which an oraganization can measure for that employee. Picture this. I visited an organization where some training was scheduled for ceratin departments. Close to 30 employees were supposed to attend the meeting. Training time was 1:00 pm which is clashing almost with lunch time. Few employees were raising concerns in low voice on delayed lunch but they also knew that it is useless to raise this concern as it would be seen as a trivial reason. As soon the training got over at 3:00 pm, all employees ran to grab a bite.  I know it is not possible to implement such 'work from anywhere' in all organisation or across departments in a organizations but it can definitely be tried in certain departments to see what kind of effects it has on morale, motivation, productivity. In case you are still intersted in employees who ran for lunch after training, over lunch they only one question to ask each other - did you get the training module? Answers were - somewhat, nope, trainer failed to explain many parts etc.  I guess, the only measure of success of this training was presence of employees.