Grapevine during appraisals

The idea of this article came to my mind few minutes back. Whenever there is an appraisal time in any organizations, grapevine starts floating among the employees. But what is grapevine? In simple English, it means gossip spread by spoken communication. The originator of grapevine is mostly, unknown. But I feel sometimes, it is the management only who intentionally initiates grapevines within the organizations with some well planned and defined strategies.

Now days, in my team also, there are numerous grapevines. It might be because of the appraisal time that is there in my organization. But who cultivated them, no body knows. I am getting as many as grapevine news on daily basis from my sub-ordinates. Sometimes, I listen them carefully and sometimes I hear them only.

In one my previous organizations, where I worked, one of the greatest grapevines that I heard at the time of appraisal was that the financial position of the company is too bad (anyways it’s very general). But on top of it, there was a rumor spread across all the groups that the owner of the organization is selling his property to pay the compensations to all the existing employees. So how come, the salaries can be raised at this time. But after 2 months, the fog became clear and all the employees got a decent amount of increment.

There are some advantages of injecting grapevines among the employees by any organization’s management. Some of them are

• It is not expensive.
• It is rapid.
• It is multidirectional.
• If carefully cultivated, it is capable of resolving conflicts.
• It a very simple measure of public opinion.
• It serves as an outlet for anxieties, worries, and frustration.
• It promotes unity and solidarity.
• It is voluntary and unforced.

Universal law, if there are advantages, there must be disadvantages also. If the information from grapevine is blindly accepted, it may cause severe problems i.e.

• It may reveal some degree of error.
• It might be harmful in case it is baseless or imaginary.
• It leads to misunderstanding because of incomplete information.
• It may not be reliable, as nobody takes the responsibility of it.
• It can cause damage to the organization because of its excessive swiftness at times. I mean, baseless rumors that are not clarified in time, will be accepted as truth causing a negative impact.

But most of the organizations are very smartly using this technique. They are not ignoring information received through the grapevine. They are not using this channel to supplement the formal channel. Smart organizations identify but not threaten the main source of information. Smart HR management always tries to understand the human relationship involved in grapevine.

This year, the grapevine market is very hot. There are numerous rumors spread across the nations, organizations worldwide. This might be because of the global slowdown in the market. But organizations are making money like anything in this current scenario.

Recently, I attended a seminar organized by a very reputed Indian firm and lead by a very well known person. It was an eye opener for me where I came to know of how the organizations are cultivating the grapevines and reaping money like anything in the recent times.

This year, as per the global HR consultancies say, India Inc is expected to increase salaries up to eight percent with infrastructure and FMCG sector likely to see the maximum hikes.

IT and financial services may be the worst hit. IT sector may see an average salary increase of four per cent this year. Financial services and Information Technology sectors, which have been severely impacted by the global slowdown, are unlikely to see any considerable increases in wages this year.

Big IT Giants like HCL, Infosys and Adobe are going to freeze pay this year as the recession crimps sales. I don’t know if this is a grapevine or not.

-- Sanat Sharma