The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on Wednesday dismissed the allegations of toxic work culture, saying that the junior officers have been “misguided by external elements”.
It further said that the junior staffers were misguided to believe that “they are being underpaid, even at a CTC of `34 lakh per annum, and that it would be in their interest to use issues of work culture to bargain for monetary benefits” and that “they should get automatic promotions”.
According to reports, a letter dated August 6 signed by 500 Sebi employees accused the leadership of using harsh and unprofessional language, and setting unrealistic targets. “Shouting, scolding and public humiliation have become a norm in meetings,” said the letter.
The five-page letter titled ‘Grievances of Sebi Officers – A call for Respect’ said that the management has started to overhaul all the systems and replaced them with regressive policies and frameworks. They added that the introduction of an automated management information system (MIS) is not an issue, but the threat of withholding claims for non-compliance was “unjustifiable” and “petty”.
In response, Sebi said that in the recent past, employees were demanding a 55% increase in house rent allowance (HRA) from FY23 and had raised an issue on the regulator’s MIS for key result areas (KRAs). This had led to a 15-minute silent protest. “The new demands placed by them would amount to an additional CTC of almost `6 lakh per annum,” it said.
It further added that a group of employees consciously designed a strategy to change the narrative to frame the issue as relating to the work environment, with an objective to have bargaining power to seek more benefits.
Sebi employees also alleged that while officers in higher grades also experience, relate to and empathise with their concerns, “some of them have chosen not to express these concerns vocally for fear of vindictive nature of people at the highest level”.
Their other complaints include point-wise KRA systems with unrealistic targets with changing goalposts, monitoring of minute-by-minute movement of employees, misbehaviour. For example, the KRA targets for this year were increased anywhere around 20-50% for some departments, set to be achieved by December. “Employees are not robots with a knob that one can turn and increase the output. This clearly shows that the senior management is living in another parallel universe where output of employees can be increased multifold overnight,” the letter read.
At the core of the employees’ grievances is the unprofessional language “casually” used by people at the highest level. The letter said that fear has been the driving force at Sebi for the past 2-3 years, so much so that, even officers in higher grades are afraid to attend meetings fearing for the unquestionably bad behaviour of people at the highest level.
“At one time the employees will be called names and at other times they would be shouted at by the leadership with no defence from the top management,” employees said in the letter.