The Chief Suspicion Officer

Meet the Chief Suspicion Officer (CSO). His first principle is simple: every employee is a potential conman until proven otherwise. A fever is probably imaginary. Traffic is merely an excuse. Flooded roads are a failure of commitment. Grandmothers, statistically speaking, have already died several times over.

This month, the CSO had an unusually good fortnight. A young employee texted his manager: “Sir, can’t come as I have fever.” The reply was not “Get well soon”. It was, “Get a doctor’s certificate,” because the director had ordered that anyone claiming illness must produce a prescription.

A few days later came the sequel. An employee in Pune requested permission to work from home because heavy rain had made commuting difficult. His manager refused. “We’ve all travelled to work,” he declared, before generously suggesting a rickshaw or an Uber, as though the obstacle was imagination rather than submerged roads.

Two screenshots, two cities, one management philosophy: trust is to be withheld until documentary evidence arrives.

The CSO’s toolkit has changed little over the years. There is the demand for proof and there is the great Indian managerial argument that because yesterday was unpleasant for me, today must be unpleasant for you. Shared suffering is elevated into company policy.

What has changed is visibility. Once upon a time, such exchanges died quietly inside office walls. Today they travel from WhatsApp to Reddit to LinkedIn to newspaper columns in less than two days. The CSO thinks he is protecting the company’s interests. In reality, he has accidentally become its most effective PRO — except the publicity is entirely the wrong sort.

Suspicion, besides, is an expensive management strategy. Take the compulsory prescription. A feverish employee now spends money on a consultation, queues at a clinic, and returns with a certificate confirming what everyone already suspected: that he has a fever. The company gains a piece of paper. What it loses is considerably more valuable. The employee has learnt, permanently, what the organisation thinks his word is worth.

That lesson spreads faster than any virus. Engagement surveys consistently show that only about one in five employees in India describe themselves as truly engaged at work. There are many reasons, but trust features near the top of the list. Long before people resign, they disengage. No medical certificate can diagnose that condition.

The real casualty of distrust is not attendance but candour as employees in such organisations believe it’s safer to stay silent than to risk being questioned. Ironically, the organisations that trust people the least often become the last to learn when something has gone wrong.

Defenders of the CSO always produce the same argument. Some employees abuse sick leave. Of course they do. But most sensible organisations understand that a small amount of misplaced trust costs less than universal distrust. Every control mechanism has a price. If you verify absolutely everything, you eventually create an organisation where people stop behaving like adults because they are no longer treated as adults.

The best managers follow a different protocol. When someone says, “I have fever,” they reply, “Get well soon,” and they mean it. Every now and then they are deceived. But their teams also stay longer, volunteer more readily when crises arise, and rarely need policing in the first place. People have an inconvenient tendency to live up — or down — to the expectations placed upon them.

The CSO, however, will continue demanding prescriptions. One only hopes that, someday, a doctor examines him and writes the only diagnosis that really matters: Acute deficiency of trust. Unfortunately, there is still no medicine for it.