The Other Side of a 70-hour work week

Sometime during the early 2000s when I had just embarked on my career journey with the International Service Sector, I was volunteering for a music concert in Bengaluru – an event that was being sponsored by some of the most prestigious MNCs of those times. My work mainly involved distributing pamphlets during the week leading up to the main event and arranging chairs on the day of the event. When our group of volunteers broke for lunch that day, a very unassuming, extremely grounded gentleman approached us and enquired how our day was going, whether we had eaten, whether we needed some rest, and all this with genuine concern. You could make out that he was not asking these questions for the sake of asking them. I was sure that if any of us was facing any problem, he would have rolled up his sleeves and sorted it out for us – no matter how menial the task. Little did I know at that time and I was thoroughly ashamed of my ignorance, that I was talking to the great N. R. Narayana Murthy himself. I kicked myself later for my inability to recognize him and let an excellent opportunity to have a “real” conversation with him slip past me.

Those were the times when industry stalwarts like #Ratan Tata, #Azim Premji, and N. R. Narayana Murthy were designing India’s corporate future one business at a time. Surely, they were putting in much more than 70 hours of work per week. If not for them and others like them, we couldn’t have imagined an India of today which is light years ahead of what it was back then. It is also a fact, however, that we are not quite there where the West is today. And if we sit back and relax based on what we have achieved so far, we will actually take light years to get there.

Every country in the world, at some point, has gone through a phase of struggle, devised a coping mechanism to get through it, and progressed into what it is today. Some countries are far ahead in this race, and some are far behind. The ones who are ahead, have the luxury to work far less than even the nominal 40 hours per work week. The ones who are not, especially the developing ones with high potential and aspirations, don’t.

Growing up in the 1970s, I have seen people struggling with employment. It was not an easy task to get a job back then. Moreover, since the Western culture had not quite taken over, a 6 days work week was a norm. “Work from home” was a phrase that was unheard of. And unless you were a part of an employee union, your work-related problems remained unaddressed. But you still held on to your job for dear life.

If we go further back to the pre-independence era, the problems were far different. Getting independence was the first and foremost thing in the mind of every self-respecting Indian. So, forget about the number of work hours, the fight was for survival. Every generation has therefore struggled in its own way to make life easier for the next one. Eventually, there will come a time when these struggles might stop (or not, depending on how we act today) but is this the right time to debate about a 70-hours work week?

The past couple of generations have been instrumental in bringing about a paradigm shift in corporate India giving it a much-needed facelift, generating millions of jobs, bringing new businesses, creating domain expertise, and in general raising the standard of living across the masses. I for one had never seen the insides of an airplane till I was 30. But today I don’t think twice about flying since availing flights has become much more affordable; albeit for some of us. Because all said and done, India still remains a highly polarized nation in terms of the haves and the have-nots. The polarization is also true with the fundamentalists on the one hand and the liberalists on the other. To bring everyone onto a common platform is going to take time, not to mention tremendous efforts on our part – the working class. So, shying away from hard work is definitely not an option for us today.

The problem with society is that we tend to be individually selfish and overlook the service that we would be rendering to our motherland through all that hard work. Instant gratification seems to be the order of the day with extremely myopic views on how much can be drawn out of life. The question is what is it that needs to be drawn out – higher salaries for lesser work resulting in a skewed reality of well-being precariously bordering on complacency and laziness or the sheer will to pick up that work and see it through to the end with the vision of a thriving population building a prosperous nation that is way ahead of its game in the international arena?

Unless of course, we get paid by the hour so it’s entirely up to us and our financial targets to decide how much we want to work. Or, we can become extremely disciplined in the way we spend those 8 or 9 hours at work – making it so productive that 70-hours of work is delivered in 40-hours. This can easily be achieved through continuous improvements (or alternatively through automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the like). On the flip side, however, we should then not complain about job losses, layoffs, and pay cuts.

The debate is also about getting paid only for 40-hours a week but working for 70-hours which on the face of it sounds unfair. On a lighter note, I have even seen the reverse happening but no debates have ensued around that. The Call Centre and Business Process Outsourcing industries (which some people have the audacity to look down upon) were the forerunners of today’s Global Capability Centres. The primary reason why the International Service Sector has been booming in India is the edge we have had because of the ability to keep our costs low. Over the years however, with an increase in the talent pool and the rise in domain expertise, the salaries of skilled resources are close to if not at par with their western counterparts. The “edge” is therefore fast eroding and if we do not replace it with something more viable, the impending exponential growth of the GCCs might be short-lived.

Lastly, I also wonder about this whole debate on well-being centered around fairly well-paid white-collared corporate employees and the empathy they get when they are not able to celebrate certain festivals with their loved ones or miss out on certain family events due to business priorities. I wonder who is running the world during these said festivals when apparently everyone else is busy celebrating? What about doctors, sanitation workers, police officers, and the armies guarding our borders? During the recent pandemic, the entire corporate world had the option to work from home – a luxury that has been extended by most corporates even post-pandemic – a new normal. I have on the other hand seen doctors being forced to work for double the time with half the pay and with no certainty that their own lives will be safe. Somehow the others who made our lives easier during the pandemic and continue to do so like the ones who deliver stuff right to our doorstep, get secondary treatment. End of the day, we need to first drastically reduce this divide, stop being hypocritical, and start looking at problems holistically rather than take a one-sided biased approach. And if hard work is not an option, you might want to find alternatives where you can have the cake and eat it too. #theothersidebyaparna #workculture #corporateculture #mnc #generations #GCC #BPO #corporates #leadership