Who holds Indian workplaces together—Glue employees. But they rarely get rewarded

Unsung heroes: Why glue employees matter more than employers think

Glue employees don’t take the spotlight but they’re as valuable to employers as star performers

In my 15 years of journalism, I have written countless stories on how corporates are barely managing to hold on to their high-potential employees, or why retrenchments are more than just a passing wave.

Between the mavericks, the weakened middle order and the meandering bottom dwellers, I did not once write about ‘glue employees’—the lot who hold it all together. And how did I miss them? Well, because I was as blind to this phenomenon as most of India Inc.

It hit me while reading a Wall Street Journal article in which reporter Heidi Mitchell spoke with behavioural scientist Jon Levy about who a ‘glue player’ is. A glue-player, Levy explains, is someone who holds a team together, helps recruits settle in and often has the perspective needed to spot the right way forward for the group, but does not take the spotlight.

So a glue-employee is one who gets the best out of a team. But here’s the catch. In a fiercely competitive workplace, where top performers are rewarded while the rest are relegated to the ‘better luck next time’ bucket, the glue-player often gets shuffled in with the rest.

This can be a big mistake by managers who rose via the ‘high performance at any cost’ route and have had little training or inclination to appreciate someone who did not take this fast track.

I recalled a former colleague who fit the mould of a glue-player as if it were made for him. A good performer and dependable colleague, he helped many of us out of professional ruts that came more frequently than we had expected. At the end of many an event, he was mentioned in appreciation emails from bosses, an acknowledgement he invariably shrugged off. Never the best, but always the one who stitched together pending work when others slacked off.

In the end, the team won. The business won. The slackers went unnoticed. The top performer mopped up some credit. And the glue-employee quietly faded into the background.

I thought of other glue-employees that I may have known, and I realized that whenever I have been pushed against the wall because of a work deadline, the team’s best performers did not always help out. My slips would have never impacted their career trajectory, so why bother?

But there were a few who volunteered help. They thrashed out the work with me, stayed late, checked after submission and brought out a few chuckles with anecdotes of past slip-ups on their part. Was I grateful to them? Of course. But did I credit them with any of my career success? Admittedly, no.

Somehow, our goodbye letters tend to point out the achievers who helped us improve our work, but rarely those who helped us go through the routine grind, battle monotony and get bigger projects by putting in a word here and there on our behalf.

The Wall Street Journal interview had a point on compensation and whether glue-players should be rewarded the way high performers are. It made me wonder if it is even possible in India Inc, especially in large organizations where getting lost is easy.

Dear reader, it does not matter which sector you work in, but have you filled up any appraisal form where you have been asked how you helped someone else achieve their targets? I do not mean the conventional ‘are you a team player’ question that has become quite routine. But have you ever been measured on your contribution towards someone else’s success? I wager most of us have not filled in such a questionnaire or been asked to answer this question during an appraisal process.

In a corporate culture where we are wired to gloat about our own success, wins of affirmation and how the organization benefits from the work we do as individuals, talking about someone else’s role or merit would seem like precious time wasted. After all, a scramble for scarce internal resources, which usually includes the boss’s attention, plays out from a very early stage in our careers.

Glue-employees are not mediocre, by the way. They could be just as good as the top performer. The difference is that they take the trouble to nudge others ahead as well. They tend to be secure in their jobs, a sense of security that can be mistaken for being under-ambitious. Bosses who know the value of glue-employees recognize the need to keep them close and reward them.

For glue-employees to be recognized formally, employers must improve how they document work contributions. This could mean detailing the roles played behind a project, instead of the task being chalked up to the designated team’s leader alone.

Such a company would soon notice that some employees’ names pop up frequently. These could form a long-list of glue-players, with endorsements from others used to create short-list. Over the last three or four years, high-potential employees have got pay hikes of 1.7 to 1.8 times the median raise; this should be offered to glue-players as well. Their retention may be more valuable to employers than they realize.

In times of uncertainty, companies that keep glue-players bonded to their roles may find they have just the right team cohesion needed for superior results.

The author writes on workplaces and education at Mint.