The Meteorological Department of Workplace Culture
By: Ashish Deora
Tags: Workplace, Workplace Culture, Continuous Improvement

I just started reading a beautiful book named “ The Reader “ by Bernhard Schlink, Carol Brown Janeway (Translator). The opening stanza of this book talks about the author who got Hepatitis at the age of fifteen. It was set in Autumn and went away by Spring.

I was curious to know more about the English seasons and started Googling about them. And like any other internet surfer, I landed on the interesting history of how the Meteorological Department of India was established.

Henry Piddington (7 January 1797–7 April 1858) was an English sea captain who sailed in East India and China and later settled in Bengal where he worked as a curator of a geological museum and worked on scientific problems and is particularly well known for his pioneering studies in meteorology of tropical storms and hurricanes. He noted the circular winds around a calm centre recorded by ships caught in storms and coined the name cyclone in 1848.

After a tropical cyclone hit Calcutta in 1864, and the subsequent famines in 1866 and 1871 due to the failure of the monsoons, it was decided to organise the collection and analysis of meteorological observations under one roof. As a result, the India Meteorology Department was established in 1875. Henry Francis Blanford was appointed the first Meteorological Reporter of the IMD. In May 1889, Sir John Eliot was appointed the first Director-General of Observatories in the erstwhile capital, Calcutta. The IMD headquarters were later shifted to Shimla in 1905, then to Pune in 1928 and finally to New Delhi in 1944.

All this started a train of thought started in me. Theoretically and majorly, we have the following seasons in the world:

Each season has its own set of characteristics that differ from place to place. For example, Summer might be the best tourist time in Europe whereas, in India, Spring is the best time to tour.

However, we cannot rely on the mere definition of a season. Everyone needs updates on a day-to-day basis. For example, we all believe that June-August is monsoon season in India, but that information isn’t enough. While planning any trip or just going out in general, we need to read daily weather reports to understand the climate. It may sound obvious.

When it comes to employee feedback, the periodicity of an annual or quarter survey becomes too broad to consider as an indicator of workplace culture. Even the monthly frequency is too big in these changing times. In a single episodic survey that happened once a year, we get a snapshot of a short period. That snapshot is easily confused with the employee opinion for the whole year.

Employee perception changes on a day-to-day basis. If the employee engagement scores in an Episodic survey was 70 then it’s a capital mistake to believe that every day the same engagement levels will exist in the workforce. Like the weather, the employee’s nature, mood, perspective and hence output also changes very dynamically. Hence, it’s important to lissen to employees on regular basis.

The meteorological department also predicts storms and cyclones. Similarly, a continuous employee feedback system starts giving bold and clear signals if a rough patch is approaching for the company. This ensures that silly issues are managed at the beginning itself and nothing significant and surprising facts unearth in the episodic surveys.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes beautifully condensed this magic of weather in a single quote. He said, “ There’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing “

Note: Views expressed are personal