When I started working, turning up was not considered an achievement. It was the bare minimum, like wearing shoes. Nobody praised you for arriving. They simply noticed, with some coldness, if you didn’t. This week I learnt that the bare minimum has been promoted. It now comes with a bonus.
With the festive sales upon us, e-commerce and logistics companies are hiring on a vast scale. Myntra has taken on more than 26,000 seasonal workers. Flipkart says it has created some 250,000 jobs, direct and indirect, for
the season. And increasingly, the money on offer is tied not to how brilliantly these workers pack boxes, but to whether they keep coming back to pack them. There are attendance bonuses, retention bonuses, and, my favourite, season-completion bonuses, which reward the heroic act of still being there when the sale ends.
The reason is simple. Last year, between 35-40% of frontline festive workers left before the season ended. Given the work involved, I am only surprised it wasn’t more. Lifting, sorting, and delivering from dawn until late, for an hourly wage that rises from about Rs 110 to Rs 150 at the peak, is not a job anyone does for the love of it. If the platform down the road offers Rs 10 more, why not go?
So the companies have done the sensible thing. They have put a price on staying. Flipkart is even paying referral bonuses, so that workers who stay are rewarded for bringing in their friends as well. It is loyalty, sold by the hour.
I find this oddly refreshing. At least it’s honest. Nobody is pretending the warehouse is a family, or that sorting parcels is a journey of self-actualisation. The deal is plain: stay till Diwali, and there’s money in it. Now look up the ladder to the glass towers, where something strikingly similar is happening in far fancier clothes.
In the IT industry, office attendance has become the metric of the moment. TCS has reportedly tied variable pay and promotions to office presence under its five-day mandate. Swipe-card data, once used mainly to find out who was stealing the good chairs, has become a performance measure. Somewhere a manager is looking at a spreadsheet of badge-ins and feeling, for the first time in years, that he truly understands his team.
The warehouse worker and the software engineer, it turns out, are being judged by the same yardstick. Were you there? The difference is the language. In the warehouse, it’s called an attendance bonus. In the tech park, it’s called “fostering collaboration”, “strengthening culture” and “the power of in-person connection”. I await the day an HR department announces a Presence-Linked Engagement Incentive, and I would bet my own variable pay that it is already sitting in someone’s draft slide deck.
There is something faintly sad about all this. For decades, management gurus told us that the future of work was about outcomes, not hours. Measure what people achieve, they said, not where they sit. Then the pandemic came, we all proved we could work from our kitchens, and the moment it was over, companies rushed back to measuring the one thing easiest to count: bodies in the building.
It’s not that showing up doesn’t matter. It does. A parcel does not deliver itself, and a junior engineer learns more sitting near a senior one than on a video call. But when you have to pay people simply to stay, the bonus is not really a reward. It’s a confession. It says the job itself isn’t reason enough.
The smarter question, for warehouses and tech parks alike, is not how much it costs to make people stay. It’s why they want to leave. Pay a delivery worker to finish the season, and he will. Pay an engineer to swipe in daily, and she will too. Whether either stays next year is another matter.