By: Rimsha Sarwar
A silent epidemic is compromising the health of employees and performance of companies in boardrooms and office corridors all over the world. According to a new analysis of labour statistics around the world, unjust hiring and widespread jealousy in the workplace have become systemic in most organizations. These two problems are not just personal irritants, but they are potent causes of stress, withdrawal, and ineffectiveness. Jealousy at the workplace, according to experts, does not come out of thin air. Instead, it thrives when employees believe that other employees are being promoted, rewarded or even offered jobs, not according to merit but due to familial ties or favoritism. As diligent people observe other less meriting people jump the queue in favor of connections over merit, frustration is bound to come. The outcomes are quantitative. According to American Psychological Association, work related conflicts such as jealousy and unfair competition are some of the leading causes of stress to about 60 percent of employees.
The core of the issue is the absence of clear-cut recruitment and promotion procedures. This is especially a problem in developing countries whereby employment opportunities are influenced by internal politics, nepotism or informal remarks and not by the qualifications. Harvard Business Review report paints a bleak picture: more than three-quarters of employees get demotivated when they observe unfair decision-making at work. The outcome is a vicious circle- bad productivity, increasing mistrust and silent drain of talent. What is more disturbing is the fact that overqualified, highly educated applicants are disregarded systematically to less qualified candidates. This lack of linkage between education and employment is so acute that the International Labour Organization keeps on reporting high youth unemployment rates among university graduates- a paradox that directly reflects to biased hiring procedures.
These trends, when seen through the prism of the Industrial Sociology, can be seen to have deeper structural issues: unbalanced relations of power, ineffective organizational governance, and lack of a real meritocracy. They are not single instances of bad behavior but are signs of power distribution and of decision legitimization or not within an organization. Lack of fairness will result in disengagement of the employees. Creativity stalls. Turnover rises. And in the long-term, the organization suffers much more loss than benefit in short-term favoritism. It has been analyzed that the problem of jealousy at the workplace and unfair hiring is not about personal flaws but a social problem that has to be addressed on an urgent basis. The companies need to go beyond lip service and enact open, fair, and merit-based hiring and promotions. This involves the publication of transparent promotion standards, anonymity of preliminary job interviews and the creation of an external control over hiring procedures. In order to encourage a healthy and productive working environment, fairness has to be designed into the system- not accidental or customary.
The writer is a freelance columnist, she can be reached at rimshasarwar23@gmail.com
