The inundation of Indian workforce succumbing to the intense stress from their organizations casts light on the emergence and exacerbation of disparate mental health illnesses among them. To quote an alarming fact – the WHO predicts that 20 percent of India’s population will suffer from mental health issues by 2020 wherein the significant portion of this figure will be the workforce. Especially women encounter a plenitude of challenges at the workplace hindering them to hone their skills and advance faster. For instance, the poll conducted in 2018 by TimesJobs for the query ‘Which is the biggest challenge women face in today’s workplace?’ reveals that work-life balance (41 percent) and harassment (20 percent) are the most critical issues for women. Ostensibly, India is being deluged with multiple cases of mental health ailments primarily among the workforce which emphasizes on the gravity of this burning crisis. Explore the excerpts hereunder with Mukund Trivedy to get edified about HyWe, the Happy Workplace Conclave and its role in metamorphosing the present-day workplace environment.

Kindly enumerate the reasons that piqued you to transform the current workplace environment at companies.

To my dismay, I learned that majority of the people at workplaces in India were suffering in silence for a multitude of reasons. Illustrating this is the case of a woman who was subjected to severe cardiac pain due to her constant fear of losing the job while her 10-year old daughter decided to a get a job on her own in order to quash her mom’s misery. The other case was that of a man who faced grave harassment from his boss to sign the resignation letter and work overnight while failing to do so will put his job at stake. Hence, he hardly went home post work and even if he went, all he did was grumble about his work pressure. After talking to these people and also inspired by my father’s (second highest blood donor in India) motives, I realized that I must take a step forward in addressing these issues immediately and came up with the idea of HyWe to suffuse happiness at workplace and thereby transform people. To organizations that solely focus on increasing the headcount, my earnest advice is that they ought to enrich their workplace ambience for employees to come enthusiastically to work every day, sing, dance and play besides work and stay happy.

Speaking to the present-day youth, what have you learnt about the attributes they are in the lookout for at workplaces?

The world we live in has beheld a sea change from parents having a command over the children to the present-day youth living with absolute freedom. Similarly, people are in the lookout for freedom in the workplaces too because it makes them perform much better and faster. Dearth of freedom highly triggers the person to quit his/her job and finally do nothing at all.

Secondly, respect is something which every employee deserves to be given as an individual at each workplace. Thirdly, people are engraved with deepest fervour to perform and contribute their best for the organization they are engaged with. Hence, it is imperative for companies to create an environment that gives people the right space to achieve their goals and of the organization with no constraints and interruptions. But after conversing with many startups, I realized that they treat people as mere numbers i.e. headcount and need to consider heart count of people to attain commendable results. Russi Mody’s (Ex-Chairman & MD, Tata Steel) quote –“I never managed the company instead my people because business is always about people and not products. All one needs to do is care about the people and the business will flourish on its own”, is what each organization must comprehend and implement to win the trust of people these days. Moreover, acknowledging people’s work once in a while is greatly essential to boost up their confidence and performance.

Could you shed some light on your strategies that might help in providing the best work-life balance to employees in an organization?

Work-life balance is another attribute that is very crucial among employees as they ought to have an equal personal life besides the professional life. Organizations must learn to be compassionate towards their employees and allow them to spend some time with their family when needed and take leaves as well. In fact, providing the employees the option to log in to their work accounts anywhere and let them continue with personal work at times needed can help them a great deal in balancing both their lives.

What are your future plans to continue promoting happiness at the workplaces?

With bubbling passion, we started this conclave and reached out to almost 100 companies at various levels so far. We indeed aspire to reach up to one million employees by conducting many more seminars, conclaves, training, workshops and membership drives in the upcoming years. Also, we are striving to unveil a forum in three areas – revelatory, counselling and creating awareness. To summarize, we constantly endeavour to handhold each organization right from advising them on what needs to be done to enhance the happiness levels of employees, diagnose and treat the existing issues at the workplace and elevate them to a stage where they will not require the conduction of any happy conclave.