Work for home

With traffic jams and other commuting related issues causing late arrivals to offices for nearly half of the employees, companies seem to have found a middle path for solving this problem by asking their workers to work from home.

"Companies want results. Whether you come to office everyday or work from home at the end of the day the output matters," the world's top IT services firm IBM's Human Resources Executive Director in India Aquil Busrai said.

Lauding this innovative policy, HR experts believe that amid the ever-growing traffic in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, anyone being spared from travelling would welcome this change, in turn, could also improve their productivity.

In a recent survey conducted by American job website Careerbuilder.com in the US, nearly 40 per cent of employees blamed traffic or long commute for causing their late arrival to the workplace.

Given worse traffic conditions in Indian cities, experts believe this percentage would certainly be higher in the country than the US.

"Rather than wasting time in travelling to work place, employees should utilise the time efficiently. They can be provided with facilities like broadband connections and printers at home," Busrai said.

Even some public sector companies, who are known to have a traditional mindset and are yet to come out with such innovative employee policies, believe that giving people an option to work from home could add value.

Such a work culture can add to the emotional bonding between an organisation and its employees, Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) HR Director V C Agrawal said. He, however, added that IOC would not start this practise anytime soon.

British banking giant HSBC's Indian arm would implement the 'work from home' strategy for newly turned mothers who need to be at home with their babies.

According to HSBC India Group Communications Head Malini Thadani, tele-conferencing is a good way for the 'work from home' employees to be in touch with the office.

When asked about the attendance issue, Busrai said, "Who cares? An employee's performance should be calculated on what he delivers, rather than how many hours he spends in office."

IBM India believes in results and the HR department would have to come out of the conventional mind set, he said, adding that HR policies should be flexible and up-to-date.

The careerbuilder.com survey found that about 15 per cent of workers admit coming late to work at least once a week.

"Consistently showing up late can affect how others in the company view your work ethic and discipline, as well as affect your productivity," the website said.

While 43 per cent hiring managers said they did not mind people coming late as long as work was completed on time with good quality, others said they would consider terminating an employee for arriving late several times a year.

When asked about primary the causes for late arrivals, over 32 per cent of workers named traffic as the culprit, followed by 17 per cent blaming it on falling back asleep and seven per cent naming a long commute as the main cause. Other popular reasons included getting kids ready for school and daycare.

Source : Yahoo.com

Group Behavior - Effects of being cut off

Washington, Aug 7 (IANS) Exclusion from a group can have negative outcomes like bad mood, reduced self-esteem and a sense of being cut off, according to research.

Jessica L. Lakin, Tanya L. Chartrand and Robert M. Arkin of Drew, Duke and Ohio State Universities, respectively, studied people's tendency to copy with behaviours of others in order to find out how this can be used as an affiliation strategy.

In one experiment, participants played an online ball-tossing game with three other computer players, and were either excluded or included in the game. After reporting their enjoyment of the game and what they thought of the other players, participants were asked to describe a photograph to a female confederate who constantly moved her foot, but not enough so that it was consciously noticed by the participant.

The researchers hypothesized that participants in the excluded condition would move their foot more to match the confederate.

In the next experiment, the procedure was kept mostly the same. This time, however, all of the participants were female. They were excluded from either a group of males or females during the ball-tossing game and interacted with either a male or female confederate during the photo description task.

Participants were also questioned more thoroughly on how they felt after the game, such as how much they felt they belonged to the group. The researchers predicted that if the female participants were ostracised by females and later interacted with a female confederate, then they would mimic the confederate more than other participants.
The results provided strong support for the researchers' hypotheses. In the first experiment, participants who had been excluded from the game mimicked the confederate during the second task more than other participants.

In the second experiment, participants excluded by members of their own sex mimicked a confederate of the same sex more than participants in other conditions. There was also an inverse relationship between feelings of belonging and nonconscious mimicry.
The study suggests that although nonconscious mimicry is an automatic action, it is still influenced by a variety of factors, such as situation and the target of the affiliation.

'People whose need to belong is threatened do not necessarily mimic the first person they see; they take into account aspects of the situation and act accordingly, all unconsciously,' the authors conclude.

The results appeared in the current issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.