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.
