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Sustained efforts required

By Shailesh Kapoor

The news that an EY employee may have died in July this year due to excessive workload surfaced earlier this week, when her mother put up a social media post. While a probe is expected to throw more light on the specific case, the incident has sparked off conversations on the corporate work culture in India.

The topic has intrigued me for years. In the first decade of my career, I worked at five different organizations, all in the Indian media industry. While each varied significantly from the others, a certain inherent chaos, an idea that’s very uniquely Indian, was a common factor across, though in varying degrees.

This chaotic energy is often seen as a virtue in Indian workplaces. It fuels a flurry of activity, not all of which translates into effective action. You might be called into unscheduled meetings long after they’ve begun, because someone decided you should be there. You might be assigned a task and asked to prioritize it over everything else, leading to schedule disruptions, not just for you, but for your entire team.

This often results in a false sense of urgency. In our research work, we find that many Indian companies provide the same brief for all research projects: ‘It’s critical, and we needed it yesterday’. Which means that they should have briefed us four weeks ago. But that wouldn’t pass the chaos test!

In stark contrast, we were once briefed by an international client about a research project in India. At the end of the briefing, she hesitantly mentioned that the project is somewhat urgent, as it was tied to a multi-nation report, and they would need the report in eight weeks. I nearly burst out laughing at this new definition of urgency.

The false sense of urgency was on display for years, when the ratings data (in the TAM era) was released at unearthly hours, often past midnight. Why it couldn’t wait till the next morning remains a mystery to me to this day. Several executives would stay back in the office (laptops weren’t as common then), doing the “runs” and sending text messages to various people, who would receive them in the middle of the night and respond with follow-up questions, forcing the executives to stay until the early hours of the morning. Thankfully, BARC India discontinued this bizarre tradition. But it’s just one example in an industry replete with them.

Interestingly, this chaotic trait also affects the Indian offices of many foreign companies, while others manage to operate their Indian branches just like their parent offices. So, is it the people or the organization that determines how an office is run? It would depend on the reporting structures. Workplaces where a significant number of Indian employees report to foreign managers in other countries tend to have less chaotic work cultures. They don’t appear to be in a constant state of urgency.

In the operating paradigm of chaos and false urgency, more hours may be spent working, but more work doesn’t necessarily get done. It’s as if the entire corporate culture of the country, with some honorable exceptions, not too many of which are in the media industry, has decided to work in a way that’s evidently inefficient and unhealthy.

Singling out specific companies would be akin to looking for scapegoats. The problem runs deeper, and addressing it will require sustained efforts from multiple organisations over several months, if not years.

Work-life Balance?!

By Ranjona Banerji

A young woman died of a heart attack because of work pressure, says her family. Her employer says that the pressure on her was no different than the pressure on all other employees.

The insensitivity of the employer aside, the subject of work pressure and the need for work-life balance has been part of our conversation for a while. A few months ago, Infosys founder Narayana Murthy proclaimed that young people needed to work 70 hours a week for the good of the nation. This amounts to 14 hours a day, in a five-day week and over 11 and half hours in a six-day week. Either way, there’s not much time to sleep, eat, commute, spend time with family, friends and so on.

Invariably, the conversation comes round to the media, and the work pressures that are put on us and that we put on ourselves.

I will be honest, when I started working 40 years ago, we had never heard of work-life balance. Because of yuppies, we did discuss work “stress” and good stress and bad stress. The upshot was a certain amount of stress made work exciting; too much made it painful. Where did the two meet? It varied from person to person.

Unfortunately, in those days, anyone who did not work at the same rate as the norm was seen as lazy or unproductive. They were often given work which did not upset the flow, which meant that they were out of the fun as well as the pressure. A newsroom can be fun especially when there’s a newsbreak. But how much fun is too much fun? I worked hard, or I think I did. Do I regret it? No. Would I have changed much? I don’t think so. But I have learnt over the years to not be judgmental about other people’s needs. I remember an intern asking me about days off in the job. I was truly shocked. I had never asked the question myself. And was clearly told that days off were rarities. And so they were.

But there’s a funny shift here. When I started working, these rules which applied to the media did not apply to many other companies. My father worked in a large multinational. Work stopped at the dot of 5.27 pm (don’t ask, something to do with unions). Weekends were off. Government followed its own rules. Banks seemed shut more often than open. There was no “service” sector to speak of. Shops shut early and were half-day a couple of times a week.

So there was a balance of sorts, bar a few professions. Junior doctors in hospitals for instance, suffered then and suffer now. Someone apparently decided that the best way to treat patients is when you are sleep-deprived and inexperienced.

The shift came post-economic liberalisation when American companies set down the rules: work work work, bully bully bully, get ahead faster than everyone else. Or so you dreamed. The ways to get ahead remain largely the same in the old system and the new: pretend to work pretend to work pretend to work take credit for other people’s work take credit for other people’s work take credit for other people’s work suck up suck up, suck up… unless you are lucky.

Within the media, we forget easily. The toxic newsroom conversation vanished, even though two colleagues died after being bullying relentlessly. The pressure of work is not new; but we pay lip service and move on. There’s a lot of misogyny as well here, with masculinity scoffing that women need time for children and households so are not good workers. The same men who want their chappatis hot and fresh, when they get home, by the way.

Where we are blind to the need for work-life balance is when it comes to the working classes. Women complain ceaselessly about domestic staff who take days off, do not come to work on time and so on. Domestic workers have no right to life, luxury, rest, recovery time and so on. Drudgery for other people is their purpose. Many women bristle when I mention this, but it is true. Daily wage labourers must use their strength and stamina for a little money and less food to feed their families. Family-run business like shops use the same theory on themselves and customers also expect on-tap friendliness in exchange for their money. There is a reason why cabin crew walk off a plane when their time is up, although passengers – who want their own work-life balanced – are inconvenienced.

Funnily there are fairly easy solutions, minus heartache. In shift systems, in realistic goals, in a monitoring of toxic bosses, in a reassessment of methods – and this works in newsrooms as much as anywhere else. The onus is on employers, not to squeeze every last drop out of their staff. The onus is on HR departments to check employee satisfaction from the bottom up, rather than top down. (To be honest, though in my experience life was better before HR was invented.) Some European countries have figured this out, much to the bemusement of Americans.

Perhaps a revisit to Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness is needed: “When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit.”

These essays were first published in 1935.

Go figure.

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal