Don’t be evil

Intel apparently fired 250 of their employees for faking bills to claim allowances like conveyance & LTA.

The company I work for has also taken many decisions of this kind. Apart from issues with fake claims for Conveyance & LTA, customer & client data is the other most critical area that our company has had to deal with.

Employees’ filling up their pockets by wrongful means has probably been there for a while now. If earlier they lost out on promotions or simply got away with a warning, today the cost of cheating the company one works for could be their job itself.

Companies today give their employees the best of benefits, treat them like a King, but what they expect in return from them is not to be evil. “Don’t be evil” is the unofficial mantra at Google. Looks like a lot of the companies are not saying as much but following the mantra nonetheless.

Most of these people, who are asked to leave, are sent away (or should we say – got rid of?) in a dignified manner. But getting rid of them from the company is not the solution in the long run. Although such people carry with them the ignominy of that episode things don’t stagnate that way. After lying low for a few days they invariably end up looking for another job and once they find one things are back to normal again. This way although the company has got rid of the bad employees there is no guarantee these bad employees will not indulge in the same (or similar) activity again in the new company they join. Some would argue why should the company throwing out the bad employees worry about how they are behaving in another company.

This is where the NASSCOM initiative of maintaining a database of all IT & ITES employees a step in the right direction & should be lauded. When such database becomes a reality all these evildoers better watch out as their background will no longer be secret and any company they apply to would get to see all about them in black & white.

Integrity is taken for granted as a virtue that everybody possesses. However things have come to such a state that it’s become imperative for companies to resort to the kind of audits & checks initiated by Intel.