Conservative companies and modern employees
Its the dream of every company to have star employees so that bosses at the top can get fat pay with almost no work. But I think this dream will never be realized in the history of humanity, the reasons are follows.
Today's companies are conservative. In a mad rush to get business they want to project a flawless image. They seems to forget every institution dominated by humans, propagation of flaws is very high. Companies make mistakes and most mistakes takes place with the handling of employees in the company.
For example a person in middle management might be afraid of his junior who is in every way superior to him and might start a negative campaign against him. Possibly by telling something wrong about him . Finding little flaws and over blowing it. The company which had relied upon this fox will find it difficult to accept the new talented junior employee.
Another thing I find it very disturbing is social media. Modern companies want to control the social and digital lives of their employees. Nothing against the company should be told in social media, there are strict rules which disobey the Indian constitutions right to free speech. For my case I experienced it first hand. One co-worker in my ex-company had a quiet a busy job in reporting to my boss what I was tweeting. When I finally heard it from my boss that he was monitoring my tweets, I wondered why the hell is he bothered about my Internet avatars? Its my personal life what the heck!
Employees are becoming more modern, more education and exposure to the western world and networking is making them more articulate and they know their fundamental rights better now than before. Faster networking means faster rate at which one can move away from conservative organizations and possibly find a modern one.
There are only few organizations that recognizes their employees right of free speech online and are able to digest criticism in a positive way, but I feel companies will loose out to change in technology trends. Once I worked in HCL (10 years ago) and there I saw a board saying that employees should not have phones with cameras, but now? Which phone doe not have a camera!? Even then people use their phones to take shot of the rule board and sent them to the admin as a gesture of defiance.
Another funny thing I face as a consultant is, bosses of many companies contact me. They like to get a breeze of latest webtech from my mouth so that they can bug their employees to implement it without proper understanding of what it is. One question they normally ask is "how that such a small company (without all those management and rules) able to do that project just like that" . I would often say "I don't know" rather than to loose their trust by saying the truth. A tech company is 15% tech and 80% work culture, in most Indian companies it 5% tech and 95% totally idiotic rules.