LES INDISPENSABLES , THE LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS AND ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

Healthy balance between work and personal life is a challenge most professionals have willingly given up on, happily or otherwise. Distinction between the two, has all but vanished, as work-related activities have pervasively invaded personal and family time. For many, home has become nothing more than a place for ‘homemade food’, wash, change and a nap on one’s own bed. Spending most of the twenty-four hours at workplace or at work, even though physically present at home, is now considered an indispensable ingredient for upward mobility on the coveted corporate ladder. Being expected to stay in office beyond working hours or regularly required to carry work home, is considered synonymous with one’s arrival amongst the ‘reckonable’ and ‘indispensables. It signals one’s proximity to the fountainhead of power. After all, for the coveted ‘Ferrari’ one needs to embrace monkhood of work.

Reckonable Performance Indicator

Being present mostly at work place or seen engaged in work associated activities is now a well-established manifestation of organisational fidelity. Though it has, nothing remotely connected to performance, utility and productivity, mere presence at work can be considered as organisational fidelity and amply rewarded. This trending manifestation of managerial selflessness, at well-publicised personal costs, can trigger corporate emotions like the outpouring reserved for military martyrdom. Spending time beyond the call of office schedules, seemingly showers venerability. Though, factually of worthless relevance to the organisation, it is now counted amongst visible and reckonable parameters of performance. With nobody complaining and none objectively linking presence to profitability or productivity, there is a race raging amongst many employees to be known for staying longer at work or to be seen perpetually at work.

Demanded or otherwise, the propensity of employees, seeking to be at work endlessly is attaining epidemic proportions. It is now a visible manifestation of the subcontinental work culture. Managerial hierarchies expect and overtly or subtly enforce presence well beyond work-hours and office boundaries. Many at the top expect unquestioned compliance as, at least a few amongst them could have walked the sublime sacrificial path to their current positions.

A Subcontinental Phenomenon?

Companies in Europe and USA, it is generally believed, do not encourage or expect over stays. Business mails over the weekends lie cocooned awaiting the next working day for deliverance. Even an Indian corporate within the geographical boundaries of Europe and USA do not expect or openly encourage overstays. Many corporate entities, indigenous and thriving in the subcontinent as well as multinationals offshoring business to India seem to encourage employees voluntarily staying back after prescribed work-hours to finish assigned tasks.  

Elusive Rationale

Exploitation or incompetence are just superficial explanations.

Organisations driven by greed for quick gains, could exploit employees by cruelly burdening them with targets, humanly impossible with efforts made in stipulated working time. In that case employees have no alternative but slave beyond the clock and deliver what is expected by the repressive regime. Ever since the economy was liberalised two decades back, employment opportunities have grown. Despite the current slowdown, competence does have adequate opportunities to choose from. In an environment, where strong labour laws are in place, vociferous trade unions which can easily be driven to violence keep vigil, activists are on the prowl looking for issues to be taken up and an active independent judiciary is visibly sympathetic to the oppressed individual, exploitation in its typical sense can almost be ruled out.

Are organisations besieged by disloyal incompetent individuals, incapable of delivering results expected of the hierarchical position assigned? If poor recruitment policies inundate organisations with incompetence, then the number of successful enterprises in the country should progressively be dwindling. Though incompetence plays significant role in extinction of enterprises that once thrived, it can’t be the causa mortis of all failures, because a talent pool is the prerequisite for any organisation to come into existence. Moreover, incompetence, produces nothing spectacular, despite hard and long flogging. Hordes of incompetent managers however long they stay would achieve nothing worthwhile.

If exploitation and incompetence individually do not force long work hours, what else could be enticing employees to stay back at work? Would an organisational culture that expects its members, as a matter of traditions or practice, to regularly work beyond office hours, really help organisational goals? Does such an environment really help the individual? 

The Quagmire

Most individuals in the corporate sector live and thrive by targets and bottom lines assigned. Upward mobility is driven by performance ratings and targets achieved. Amidst complaints of unrealistic expectations, there is unanimity in accepting that most, if not all, achieve assigned targets, successfully push up bottom lines and competitively increase the bar for the next fiscal. If it is a practice to enhance targets each fiscal, it is natural to assume that the previous target was deliberately soft. It is also known that targets sans fundamentals end up a cropper.

But targets alone do not justify the need for employees to regularly stay back beyond scheduled times. One doesn't have to be necessarily be in office physically to clock working hours. Continuing to answer emails or monitoring progress remotely and being subject to conditions that necessitate thoughts about work is also working.  In effect individuals, mainly those in positions of managerial hierarchy are perpetually at work or want to be seen so. While there are a few who sacrificially toil for the organisation, many spend time beyond scheduled hours, not because longer presence helps them achieve elusive targets and lift bottom lines but for the visibility associated with long office hours.

Looking a bit closer at the situation, one can make out that in most cases, it is the result of an organisational culture that has evolved due to a management matrix debilitated by incoherent definition of roles, inadequate delegation, poor decision making, lack of accountability and weak lines of communication. It results in a mutually parasitic existence, where the individual strives to elicit the most out of an organisation and the organisation in turn, embodied by other individuals, tends to wring out the most from the individual. Detrimental to competent professionalism, such an environment fosters one-upmanship, encourages personal loyalties, promotes pretence, nurtures fraudulence, and pardons purloining of efforts. It effectively and perpetually bleeds the organisation, vilifies it, inflicts losses and stunts growth.

Dumping Diminishing Returns

Law of diminishing returns is a cardinal rule that applies to everything known.  The number of hours clocked by an individual over the course of the day, over a period of time, can be objectively evaluated against productivity to prove that individual performance is also governed by law of diminishing returns. This factum, notwithstanding, to understand the issue in the right perspective, there is a need to consider the problems related to long working hours, both for the employer and the employee.

Fatigue and disturbed sleep are the initial products of long working hours.

Fatigue is known to reduce mental and physical prowess, impair judgement and concentration, degrade motivation, slow down reaction time and increase risk-taking behaviour. It reduces decision-making ability, communication skills, attention and vigilance. Sleep deprivation invites, high stress and related medical conditions.  Each of these, has a tendency to be cumulative in nature and aggressively adds on to ill effects of each other.  Sleep deprivation and fatigue is a deadly combination that can significantly erode productivity of an individual.

If one thought, these self-inflicted damages were limited to the organisation alone, there couldn’t be a bigger error of judgement. Besides the adverse effects of regular long absence in marital relationships, the impact on a nuclear family, the basic unit of modern society, due to absence of parents is unfathomable. Children groomed merely by play schools, maids and makeshift arrangements devoid of parental attention tend to acquire serious emotional problems. Hard-working parents tend to make up for the lost time through over indulging acts of pampering. Robbed of early-life role models and value systems associated with healthy nuclear families, children suffer the most. The terrible impact on the societal health is best left unsaid.

By nurturing a work culture which expects or encourages individuals to stay longer than schedules, an organisation is effectively incurring expenditure not only on eroding its own employee’s productivity and inflicting grievous physical and psychological injuries on its staff but even actively colluding to undermine the very fundamentals of a healthy happy society.

Dispensing Les Indispensables

It is not without sufficient and logical reasons that many European and forward-looking economies have introduced shorter working days and enforce adherence to work schedules. Societies hosting such enterprises claim that the result is a happier, healthier and productive workforce. Despite enforcing scheduled work-hours, these business entities continue to grow making profits. There is a scope for indigenous organisations to evaluate their management policies that allows individuals to work beyond scheduled work times.  In order to enforce work schedules on its employees, organisations may require to redraw hiring policies and reorient existing organisational culture.  This could eventually lead to finding the ‘best fit’ for the role, resulting in higher savings and better productivity. No one is indispensable. However, in each organisation there would be few who assume indispensability. All of them develop, flaunt and exercise indispensability at the cost of the organisation.

Dispensing with those attempting to be Les Indispensable may not be a bad idea for an organisation to emerge leaner, stronger and more productive.