This one I wrote while reading Dilbert (continuous for 5 hours)one day in my Britannia office. Loosely inspired from Dilbert. This was sometime in 2002.


Its my gut feel that organizational code of conduct is designed to check and restrict employee morale. A happy employee is a dangerous situation for any company, which in today's competitive world we can ill afford. With this in view, we also underwent to design a code of conduct for our company - basic assumption - our employees were found too happy. There are many ways in which employee morale could be kept in check, some of which that I could dream of yesterday in my sleep are: -

1 salary
2 Bonus
3 Health Plan
4 Inflated travel reimbursement claims
5 Stolen office supplies
6 Airline frequent flyer programs
7 Coffee/Tea
8 Personal phone calls
9 Office Sex (okie okie, am just getting progressive)
10 Illegitimate sick days
11 personal email
12 Use of laser printer for your resume
13 Free photocopies
14 Training for your next job

It was a tough job to dream about all the 14 points in one shot sleep, that's much I love you so you just wont have to bother about any point missing all willy nilly. You can debate till the cows come home and you start milking and they dont yield and you swear in the name of God and things like that, but after the corporate biggy wiggies having discovered what all can keep an employee happy (am assuming that this mail would land up in the mailbox of one CEO one hot sunny day) they would try and tie down all the damn 14 points so as not to leave any loop hole behind.

I tried to sleep again and foresee the future to relate what the Big Daddys (hereafter called Giraffes - cause Giraffes are big, and also being in the evolution chain, they are entitled to become Daddys as well) would do with each of them-

SALARY & BONUS
From now on, and ever after Bonuses will depend upon how the organization performs (say to the extent of 50%) and your own performance parameters would be so designed that they are in direct conflict with the organizational performance parameters. The organization is not going anywhere, performance or no performance - but this will help reduce employee cost, an inflated CTC and a good slotting in the B school campuses.

HEALTH PLAN
Employees will have to wear lycra masks all the time. This would keep their noses away from other fragrant, pointy objects that are also covered with lycra, without giving them the feeling of depravement. This in turn would boost employee morale. This will also help reduce inflated Viagra sales in India. Any non performance would entitle the Boss to unmask the culprit and let him die in depravity and desire. This will however inflate employee reimbursement in case of deaths occuring on duty. Subsequently, it will help Insurance companies charge a higher premium and help the economy to grow.

Also, all employees should wear a tagatroot (its a kind of device that ties both your feet in one direction - yeah, the word was coined by me). This would help align employee's feet in one direction - thereby negating any aimless wanderings - and the organization, depending upon the geographical location can choose right wings or left wings. Two left feet would discourage Giraffes to hit the dance floor often where most of the time they break their hips after two drinks and a tango.

TRAVEL REIMBURSEMENT CLAIMS
Oops, this is quite touchy. Travel today has become costly, thanks to Indian Railways. Its the patronising efforts of the Biharis & Jharkhandis who stop trains in there and try and redistribute resources (journalistically condemned as robbery) and hence subisidize travel. Unfortunately, we have only one Bihar in India. Fortunately the model could be replicated with the help of local self help groups (like what HLL is doing with Project Shakti and women, but thats a different story). Travel subsidy thus availed from Indian Railways would be equitably distributed between the Organization and the self help groups (like Ranvir Sena, MCC etc). More so, we can actually try and be a little Machiavellian by reimbursing them in kind. This would not only help you sell expired stocks, but would also give you increased penetration (limited only to sales scenario) and distribution width. Nationally we would contribute to GDP and per capita consumption.

STOLEN OFFICE SUPPLIES
There was a case in one of the companies sometime back that an employee took VRS and opened a stationery shop out of the supplies that he took back home in the 23 years of his illustrous service. Most of the employees do believe that they can carry their work back home, but end up only carrying the supplies. This could be a fatal situation. in 1992, Real Madrid saw most its team getting converted into FC Barcelona before they could say Carlos Menem. So you see the point. This could be easily tackled by the rationing system introduced by JLN (Nehru) as Fair Price Shops in 1952. Ideally every employee shouldn't be given more than
1 Pencil
2 Drawing Clips
1 Pen refill
per month. This would tantamount to 4 km of writing from an employee (way above even the American national average) and the clips would hold all those papers together. Things like Stapler, Gum bottle, Files etc can be shared between the entire department. This develops team spirit.

AIRLINE FREQUENT FLYER PROGRAMS
This is one of the most tangible happy moments that you can ever see an employee with. 80% of the buggers who fly in those shiny metal objects where they serve soft drinks and peanuts are the ones who would rather fly than walk on company money. Ask them to shell out the money and they'd rather walk for 2 days to get to their home. The organization has every right to every mile that the employee flies. Taking the logic forward, the organization also has the right over any mile that your wife flies, your daughter elopes and your son fritters.
Hence employees should now after be booked as cargo. The frequent flyer points thus accumulated could be cashed in for flying cows and goats from New Zealand and utilizing them for animal husbandry and then again shipping them out. Foreign jaunts could be subsidised by Cargo space available in those planes. This would enable another dairy revolution in the country and help reduce road accidents due to unsatisfied bulls running amock people in the cities looking for cows.

PHONE CALLS
Communication, taunted as the buzz word by the IT gooks has almost single handedly inflated overhead costs by 30%. Hence, organizations would now take the help of ESP. A sales manager trying to communicate loss of sales in his region to his superiors would do so by pinching his bottom with a prick. This medium of communication has to be developed to such an extent that his superior jumps of his seat (and not itch over his crotch) at the same time. This would take some time. In the meanwhile, responses should be tested on pricking on any other place. I am very sure that a correlation could be obtained for all possible messages.

OFFICE SEX
I blame sex and paper for most of our current problems. Here's my logic. Only one person in a million is smart enough to invent a printing press (take that - it took 1600 years since Christ for a Guttenberg to invent it !). So, when society consisted of only a few hundred apelike people living in caves, the odds of them being a genius were fairly low. But people kept having sex and with every moron added to the population, the odds of a devious smarty pants slipping through the genetic net got higher and higher. When you have got several million people running around having sex all willy nilly, the odds are fairly good that some preggy ape-mom is going to squat in a field someday and pinch out a printing press making deviant. Once done, it was a slippery slope after that. we were pretty much doomed. Two blinks later and we are switching batteries in our laptop computers while streaking through the sky in shiny metal objects in which soft drinks and peanuts are served.
Thus offices should tread this territory with an abdomen guard. Any space permitting seating for more than one should be banned. Women should be given designer burqas complete with oxygen cylinders, pepsi bottles and even night vision binoculars. men should be provided digitally controlled abdomen guards that locks them depending on the time they swipe their cards in and out of the office premises. enhanced R&D should be encouraged to control temperature and humidity in those zones.
Every cubicle should be equipped with its own chastity belts and iron maidens. Women visitors should only be allowed in the morning hours (when men are typically either drunk or too exhausted by the fight back home).

To be continued... am getting bored now..