Lamenting the Lack of Professionalism in the Pakistani Workplace

Komayal Hasan
Nov 1 · 7 min read

Workplace professionalism, as a practicable concept which should ideally (and if this is not achievable, then at least partially - and with a decided willingness that is both self-generated and externally encouraged) govern the minute-by-minute workings of the personnel employed in an office setting, continues to remain an elusive observance in Pakistan. And as someone who has worked and built a budding career in the content-production domain literally from the ‘ground up’, I shudder to make any sweeping correlations between the terms ‘professional’ and ‘local worker’; because otherwise, I would put myself at risk of both becoming and being thought of as more naive than I really am.

The first charge leveled against the typical Pakistani worker has a lot to do with semantics - or more precisely, with a failure of making peace with them.

The bulk of our office toilers, simply put, are hard-pressed to understand just what being a ‘professional’ actually means.

A lot of this ‘character’ or ‘persona lapse’, as many (I should mention, Western) HR theorists are keen to put it, arises from faulty childhood (read: parental) and cultural conditioning, which leaves our workers unable to firmly draw emotional and psychological boundaries between the professional and personal spheres. This blurring of fields, where one invariably seems to impinge into the other (along with its baggage of a multitude of discontiguous mental and emotional responses), causes them to become embroiled in a lot of needless angst against their workplace peers - who may, sadly, suffer from the same dispositional proclivities.

Unresolved, this chronic consternation (as it were) has a definitively negative impact on workplace productivity - where the psychological toll of these lamentable, passionate proceedings leaves little, if any, room for a motivated round of tasks execution.

The workers caught in this vicious cycle, where every misguided (and largely instinctive) verbal or physical issuance leads to a harsher and decidedly more negative response from the recipient, take only a little time in attaining a hardened attitude; leading to a situation which results in a complete overturning of the comfortable environment of workplace exchange that is usually much more prominent when a particular working team is first consolidated and gets down to business.

The remedy to this problem is simple and can arise from plain old common sense - provided that the workers concerned are willing to listen to its instigations and downplaying their intuitive responses. Not every snarky rejoinder requires a retort; not every ‘bark’ directed in one’s direction warrants a stone pelt (to paraphrase Winston Churchill - a complicated character like many of history’s notable figures).

Silence, and a steely resolve in putting one’s efforts towards the non-grudging completion of the tasks at hand, is usually the best way of diffusing toxic or nearing-belligerence workplace situations. As workers, this is what we come to the office (and are paid) for, after all - and not to cultivate social connections on a primary footing, or engage in acerbic political drama, in every seeming opportunity which may present itself. Intrigue like this is not suited to one’s personal domain either, where an exploitative temperament can (obviously) wreak more damage than any instance of good ever will.

A lot of people, unfortunately, don’t understand these simple truths, or do so only after a lot of water has already been spilled.

The second charge deemed responsible for engendering this predicament actually has to be apportioned to the workplace - and onto the heads of our undiscerning management officials, to be precise.

Most departmental heads and office line-managers (charged with dealing with large numbers of individual teams) are seen to play the largest role in fostering team dissension and dissatisfaction; mostly on account of their own uncompromising (read: rigid) understanding of how a team should be run.

Like in most human relationships, the manager-employee relationship can go a long way if it comes with a top-down outpouring of some much-needed flexibility; from a willingness on the part of the manager to see the 'big picture' and overlook any slights committed by his/her working subordinates (provided that these do not disrupt the workflow), and an empathetic stance on the latters' part towards adhering to the set team hierarchy - most prominently by not letting any other personal factors get in the way of timely tasks execution and the exhibition of a congenial/affirmative attitude.

In real terms, however, most of our workplace managers are the products of the system, the established organizational culture; whose rungs they may have invariably climbed to reach their current level of career success. So true to custom and expectation, they espouse the same values that they have internalized over the course of their professional progression; seeing their administrative methods to be the ‘best suited’ managerial mechanisms for effectively dealing with their team workers.

In the workplace, one of the biggest problems with this concretized approach arises when stability (fixity) loving Gen-X managers have to cope with Millennial (and now, increasingly, Gen-Z) workers - many of whom harbor a raging skepticism towards established authority structures and rules of procedure. Although work productivity is not often unduly affected by this tendency (who can resist the glitter of the monthly paycheck?), young workers in office settings nowadays increasingly demand an explanation of the rationale behind why they have to do what they are being told to do!

The managers who can provide a plausible argument on this front, however, and - better yet - can come up with a more intelligible recourse to doing things, are guaranteed both their respect and compliance. For the more unruly of these workers, the door, of course, is always there.

In many instances, it so happens that a particular worker may exhibit certain undesirable temperamental traits that impede the harmonious functioning of the overall working group.

Often referred to as the proverbial ‘black sheep’ of the office space, these employees are normally low-performers on both the productivity and team engagement counts. And they are usually taken up by organizations to meet their team employee-counts when more suitable resources are not available.

The biggest danger in retaining these workers arises from their tendency to ‘infect the pond’; to make other workers in an office setting susceptible to their own unprofessional whims, and thereby subversive. Oftentimes, the more insidious members of this employee category seek to reduce a set, high-performing workplace status quo to a new, low-energy and motivation performance median which more adroitly suits their operational comfort - thereby impacting overall group productivity measures in a negative manner.

Following a remedial approach, it is the duty of organizational managers to enroll these workers in appropriate training/skills polishing programmes; provided they wish to retain their services. Otherwise, and with the availability of more suitable resources, it is often a good idea to relieve them of their duties at the earliest.

As every workplace professional can attest, it normally fares well for a particular worker to be admonished for a particular work-failing during the budding stages of his/her career - as the bud nipped early is thereby prevented from turning into a fully grown weed (to use a harsh, albeit true, analogy).

The systemic institutional failure in Pakistan, which largely spans the country’s private and public sector domains, is another entrenching factor that contributes to the malaise of workplace unprofessionalism.

Good institutions, with solid systems of procedure and accountability checks, can provide the right environment for ‘taming’ even the most unaccommodating of workers - it goes without saying. The inverse case, of course, of incompetent institutional frameworks which cultivate corruption in the workforce, also holds true; and there exist, unfortunately, many exemplars of these in the country.

This concern can obviously be attended to by a willingness on the part of the government, as well as by local administrators (the parties directly concerned), to rethink their terms of workplace operation and to devise systems which more pointedly encourage a desire for wanton professionalism (perhaps by initially monetizing this incentive).

The traditional behaviorist ‘carrot and stick’ approach, strengthened in its applicable viability on the back of established usage, continues to rake in the best worker responses on this front. It is also preferred by many management professionals on account of its ease of understanding and due process, as well as its valuable characteristic of producing quantifiable results (at least as far as the Pakistani work setting is concerned).

When considered in full, it may perhaps be better to formulate hybridised corrective strategies which address all of these concerns at the same time. These, naturally, will have to be customized solutions; since every workplace has its own woes of unprofessionalism to deal with.

One thing, additionally, is certain, and it is that we cannot wait for a grassroots cultural shift to take place - as a sort of insurance for bettering workplace mores. What we need is decisive, company-level, micromanagement, which, when orchestrated by even a handful of the big companies, will foster a movement that will usher in real change.

    Komayal Hasan

    Written by

    Blogger, Poet, Culture Critic, nonconformist - and ardent bibliophile

    Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
    Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
    Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade