Bond with the Best – But is it worth it?

Many of our colleagues have already defined what a bond is and brought to our knowledge many different types of bonds in different organizations. Having never worked, much of this information was new to me but not surprising at all, having passed once through the placement process during engineering.

Let us for a little while put on hold the organizational aspects and instead think about the human side of an employment bond and what it does for employee morale. Bonded labour, as Amrita and Binayak have called it, basically destroys the love and respect that an employee should have for the organization, which in turn affects productivity and output. The feeling of being trapped or jailed by an employment bond replaces the loyalty towards an organization with feelings of mistrust and exploitation. Now the employee is working less towards making profits for the company and thinking more about how much he can extract from the company in return. Thus we see instances of employees abusing their rights and allowances, making full use of reimbursement from the company, not caring for the hit on their employers. Even in times of recession, we see employees running away for slightly better options, even though the scenario is going to be basically the same elsewhere too, rather than sticking with their company through rough weather. Here we see the emergence of most admired companies, which care for their employees, manage to retain them even in the worst of times, and may even convince them to take a temporary pay cut to help out the organization. These employers, we observe, generally do not have to employment bonds.

It is these very employers, who manage to build such a bond with their employees, that they do not need to implement any sort of employment bond (pardon the pun) Here, the employees actually want to work for the betterment of the organization, actually want to see their project completed before they can even think about other projects, let alone options outside their firm. Priyanka Panda expresses it perfectly in the words “The spirit is important to retain the employees rather than the force of sword”

We have already seen employment bonds changing the opinion of the company in the minds of present as well as prospective employees, for the worse. These companies are even avoided in placement season for this very reason (as quoted by several of our colleagues). So , as these employment bonds (I refer to postpaid ones since prepaid bonds means you have basically lost the money) are not legally enforceable in India anyways, is an employment bond worth all the negative publicity, the bias and spoiling the image of your company? Or are you better off scrapping the employment bond and building a different kind of bond with your employees instead?