Many companies and organisations these days have something like “staff welfare department”. This is created for the purpose of satisfying some norms of the institution to show off that they care for their workers. Sometimes, it is created as a mandate to satisfy some labour law or government norms.
What these staff welfare departments do:
- Celebrating staff birthdays
- Taking on one day or two day picnics and travels during the holidays!
- Conduct sports and games beyond the working hours
- Meditation programmes for stress relief – which is a temporary relief
- Talks by “experts” who gaslight you to believe that the work stress is because you are lazy or inefficient at work.
- Make the staff dance for some company function, which gives the management an extra ego boost, that the workers not only dance to their tune all the year, they also literally dance like circus animals as per the instructions of the ring master. Not to forget the practice sessions that go beyond working hours and the celebrations that do not compensate for the extra time!
- Ethnic day for workers. Celebration of Navaratri and dressing with different colour dresses.
What the staff welfare departments ought to do or should be doing for enforcing real staff welfare:
- Implementation of medical insurance and other social security benefits for the employees
- Ensure that the employees get leaves as per the rules of the government
- Maternity benefits
- Coordination with various committees to ensure that the workers are not put to extra trouble
- Salary related issues
The irony is that the staff welfare department itself will not have any infrastructure or support. The person(s) in charge of staff welfare will be one more poor staff whose welfare will be neglected, but this staff has to act in front of the management that everything is going great. This staff is put into this department because this staff acts like everything is fine.
If you look at most companies, they do only nonsense things like celebrating birthdays by cutting a cake and wishing on birthdays by designing a Canva template greeting. If any employee has self respect, they should refuse to receive these birthday celebrations etc. Insteed ask for a better work culture.
