From tiffin carriers to Marutis

The black-and-white photo captures a moment in a corporate performance awards ceremony in the late 70s. The recipient, a middle-level employee, is shown receiving a stainless steel tiffin carrier, as a performance award of some sort. Illuminating the photo is not the shiny oblong receptacle in the centre of the frame but the 1,000-watt smile of pure joy on the face of the recipient. 

Seriously, a stainless steel tiffin carrier as a performance award? That, I was told, was what was specifically requested. And judging from the unalloyed delight of the employee, it was a coveted item. Apparently, wall clocks and HMT watches were the other Kohinoors of performance awards back then.

Approximately two-and-a-half decades later, a visit to an IT office in the boomtown of Gurugram ahead of a corporate performance award “nite” could not have offered a more glaring contrast. Displayed at the head of the large room where the “nite” was to be staged were a Maruti Alto and a Yamaha motorcycle, both shiny red and beribboned. These were prizes for the top two performers in the company.

Assessing employee performance in the 70s was scarcely a developed science or art in India – HR departments as we know them didn’t even exist. In the absence of the relatively sophisticated assessment tools that even mid-size companies deploy today, a fair dollop of subjectivity must have gone into the business. The assessment of the two employees who would be the recipients of the car and  bike, on the other hand, would have been much more specific, a weighted average of how much business they brought to the company, how their clients assessed them, their team's rating and so on. 

Nor were these the only goodies on offer: Down the awards chain, flat-screen TVs, five-star dinners for two, high-end watches and pens, I-pods were handed out as tokens of corporate appreciation for keeping the company somewhere on the top of the competitive charts (no doubt I-Phones and Fitbits have been added to the rewards repertoire by now).

All these gadgets may be a world away from tiffin carriers and wall clocks but they, too, are coveted items of middle class consumption. The other striking point is not just the difference in value. Wall clocks and tiffin carriers were the kind of stuff people acquired only as gifts or awards; cars, TVs et al are well within reach of the average executive, even if he or she never won a performance award in her life. 

Annual surveys have us gawping at the astronomical earnings of CEOs, and we shake our heads (rightly) at the gap between top executive earnings and median corporate salaries. We have more CEOs and top-ranking executives with lifestyles that match those of their counterparts in the developed world. Much less noticed is the prosperity of the average lower- and middle-ranking executive, the backbone of India’s upper middle class. She may still lag her developed-country counterpart in terms of pay and lifestyle. But viewed over the decades, she is much better off than her parents’ generation, certainly her grandparents’ one. 

The difference between then and now is the liberalisation of the retail credit market. Houses, cars, education, holidays are all available at relatively affordable rates (a car loan in the early 90s attracted 18 per cent interest plus reams and reams of paperwork).  A millennial starting out on a career today is likely to own a house and car before she is 30. If her grandparent had worked a public- or private-sector corporate job, she would have heard of him drawing a loan from his company to buy a house – that, too, only after he’d worked there for yonks and likely paid off with his provident fund savings. 

Longevity, or lack of it, is one of the ironies of the performance-reward business these days. Such is the nature of competition that companies feel compelled to buy loyalty with sumptuous prizes and bonuses to top performers. Yet attrition rates rise steadily as competition intensifies and companies poach from one another. Back in the 60s and 70s, people worked in one, maybe two, companies, for their entire working lives, and appeared to appreciate hugely the modest fruits of their lifelong labours. The latter lifestyle is touted as a model of middle class values in contrast to these days of extravagance and plenty. In truth, the difference between enforced fidelity and transactional loyalty is a thin one indeed.