Viral post

It was a regular working day for me. I received a call from my friend, Seema who told me to immediately come to the cafeteria. I felt that something serious had happened so I rushed to the cafeteria and found my friend having her breakfast at ease. I asked her what had happened and she handed over her phone to me and asked me to read a post.

The anonymous post read, "my company has a manager called as Sudhakar. He favours a very specific group of people. He is in love with a girl from our team and he always favours her. Anybody who is in his good books gets promoted quickly while others spend years to chase it. I have been working here for 7 years but he is the worst manager I had seen".

I almost dropped Seema's phone from my hands. I was shocked to read the post because I knew Sudhakar. I did not know him well enough to judge whether the post was true. Seema had seen the shock on my face, hence decided to tell me more about it, "this post is about the manager from the automation team. It is going viral. I have heard that the upper management is investigating it. It was posted by a team member who had already left the company but the management wants to understand if the allegations are true".

I would not say that I was surprised with the allegations. We ourselves had seen some of the people from his team getting praised again and again. I have personally scene that only a selected number of people get promoted from his team. A lot of people from his team were upset with him. Yet I did not want to pass any judgement about him and thought that management should investigate it.

When we returned to our desk my supervisor called me to her cabin. I could not understand the reason for an ad hoc meeting, "a social media post is doing rounds about Sudhakar being biased. I am sure you must have seen it. I am a part of the investigating committee on that matter. Before I start the investigation I wanted to check with you if you had any experiences with Sudhakar where you felt that he was acting bias". My manager was counting on my opinion.

I informed her that I did interact a lot of times with Sudhakar, however our communication was limited only to the launch of the new database and not about his team.

My manager post and then added, " I thought I would get a head start from you but looks like you want to play a diplomatic role. No worries investigation would take place regardlessly".

The investigation did take place and it uncovered that Sudhakar had been acting biased towards a few team members. The management felt that Sudhakar was a good asset to the company and hence no further action was initiated towards him.

It shocked me to know that management was able to uncovered the truth but decided to bury it to save one individual. I felt that the justice was not served to the people in his team. I learnt that day that social media can create a storm but the outcome would only lie in the hands of the most powerful people.