Monday, November 12, 2001		Article

Indian techies get lessons in post-attack etiquette
Anshuman Daga

FOR thousands of US-based ethnic Indians, it is not just business that has been affected by the September 11 attacks on the USA.

Employers have turned cautious after some Asian ethnic groups including Indians fell prey to suspicion and barbs after the attacks. Their advice to staff — Be culturally sensitive, avoid heated political discussions and dress as Americans do.

Some hate crimes against Indians have been compounded by media reports that dealings with clients have become testier. Indian companies have moved fast to contain potential damage.

"It’s better to be safe in the present circumstances. We are making sure that (our employees) don’t stick out like a sore thumb," a spokesman for privately held Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest software exporter, told Reuters.

About 5,000 of the company’s 16,000-strong workforce are based in the USA.

For nearly a decade Indian software workers, either employed by the US companies or Indian subsidiaries, have been at the heart of a technology-fed boom in the US economy. The attacks changed the mood.

More than 10,000 employees of India’s top five software exporters work in the USA, the main market for the country’s software services sector. Tens of thousands of Indians work for the US firms.

Most Indian software companies are being careful to make sure their workers are sensitive to their US clients.

Companies like TCS and i-flex Solutions Ltd, a privately held financial software firm, have asked their US employees to stick to a Western dress code.

"We have asked our staff not to get into any extreme public discussions and behave like good corporate citizens," Ganesh Natarajan, chief executive officer of Zensar Technologies says, just back from a week’s visit to the USA.

Caution

The USA has accounted for more than 60 per cent of India’s software exports, which crossed $ 6.2 billion in 2000/01 (April-March).

"Everyone in the U.S. is exercising caution, especially the Asians," R. Vidyasagar, head of human resources at i-flex says.

"There is no major fear psychosis but we have asked our staff to be careful," he says.

Indian software firms cater to a diversified mix of technology, banking and telecom companies, with staff employed at client sites.

"Our belief is that the US is an open society and we are confident of the American people’s ability to help their customers and partners act in a free and fair manner," Hema Ravichandar, head of human resources at Infosys Technologies, India’s second largest software exporter, says.

Ravichandar said Infosys US employees have been asked to carry identification cards and related documents with them.

"We are reinforcing our message of heightened security and sensitivity to the geography our employees are working in," she said.

THE days when US bond traders and media power-dressers were pleased to find white powder in envelopes are apparently over. As the backlog of snail-mail mounts in the US, and people all over the world begin to look suspiciously at every packet that arrives in the post, the attractions of e-mail has become more tempting by the day.

After all, the worst thing you can catch from e-mail is a virus that wipes your hard disk or sends a porno messages to everyone in your address book. And you can avoid many of these downsides simply by not using Microsoft’s e-mail software. So stand by for a massive increase in e-mailing.

Problem solved? Er, not entirely. You may not catch anthrax from e-mail, but it can seriously damage your working life. In fact, there are reasons for fearing that electronic messaging is already a monster that is out of control. Many office workers, for example, spend up to four hours a day just dealing with the stuff that flows incessantly into their inboxes. They complain of having to make choices between answering e-mail and doing ‘real’ work. There are reports of people dreading holidays simply because of the mountain of electronic messages that will await their return from the offline world.

Other downsides include the power e-mail gives to employers to snoop on their workers’ communications. And lawyers are beginning to see the lucrative possibilities of trawling through e-mail archives in legal proceedings, because managers often reveal things in internal e-mail conversations that they would never voice in public. (Microsoft’s e-mail archives were the most potent weapon wielded by the US Department of Justice in the anti-trust suit brought against the company.) These problems will all get the worse if the flow of messages swells to a torrent, courtesy Osama bin Laden & Co. If training departments do not already run courses on ‘managing your e-mail’, they had better start now.

The strangest thing about the e-mail phenomenon is that most of those who complain about it seem to regard the electronic torrent as an irresistible force rather than a problem that can be managed. They talk wistfully of finding technological solutions — for example, intelligent software that can ‘read’ messages and make good judgments about their importance — whereas, in fact, they could make considerable inroads into the problem by just using common sense.

How? Well, they could start, for example, by teaching employees procedures for coping, such as setting aside half an hour at the beginning and end of the working day for e-mail, and keeping away from their inboxes for the rest of the time. I’m told that one company makes its open-plan office workers don red baseball caps when they are dealing with e-mail - just to make a point.

The most important insight that companies might inculcate in employees, however, is the notion that just because e-mail is free doesn’t mean that it’s cheap. In fact, it has rapidly become an extraordinarily expensive medium because it consumes the scarcest resources of all — people’s time and attention. 

— Observer News Service