Tricks of the Trade

I have been working in Indian IT industry for quite sometime. It about time to jot down a few tricks that are used at Work, especially at the time of your appraisal interview.

Most freshers are naive, they put in the required amout of work for 6 months after which they go into thier appraisal interview with a big smile on thier face. ( trying to keep a smiling face for 2 hours is not a very good idea. ) Expecting some nice words of recognition. But they are getting into the game without knowing the rules of the game.

Some of the interesting things that freshers assume is that they will be rated on the spot or during the interview, well the game is not played like that. Imagine a Manager has a team of 10 people. Now his plan will most likely be to rate one persone as Exceptional , the majority(about 8 people) as Average and one unfortunate guy as below average. Now why has ur manager permedidated on this kind of results. Its simple really, he has to project an image of normal/well functioning team to his supervisor, So to do that he has to have the majority of his people in Average category, a few good performers and an unlucky below average guy.

Next comming to the distribution of Bonus or a hike. Most people have not clue about the reasons other than guessing that the guy who got a bonus has a good relationship with his manager. A bit of economics will shed some light on this. A Manager might have Rs 10L at his disposal. Now how will he distribute this among his 10 people?
Manager has to give the largest chunk to the most experienced person on his team, irrespective of his productivity level or contribution to the team. I call it the 'trickle down effect', by the time Rs 10L trickes down to the fresher, it will have become 10k!

So if you do have aspirations to get the maximum out of an organization, first learn the rules of the game of that Organization. As each company has different rules for rewarding an employee. So dont expect a raise just because you put in extra 10hrs/Week unless that resulted in a huge profit for the company(in the range of few 100k's) then rewards will definitely trickle down to you.

Keep watching this space for more Tricks of the Trade.