Will eight hours ever be enough?

Scientists suggest that the notion of working from home has compelled people to spend more time at their jobs than they did while they were physically present at an office. Representation pic/Getty Images

I began working in the media industry at the age of 20, and vividly remember being encouraged to spend as much time at the office as possible. It was easy, of course, because everything is manageable for one at that age. What began as a promise of eight-hour shifts though, quickly grew to a new normal of 10 hours. I did it because everyone else around me was doing it too. By my third year in the business, I found it perfectly acceptable to walk into an office by 9 am, leave at 10 pm, then return the next morning to do it all over again. It was a cycle that didn't stop. By my thirties, work had encroached into my weekends with impunity, and I thought nothing of powering up a laptop after breakfast on Sunday mornings to prepare for a presentation on Monday.

It took me years to acknowledge that corporate India is a merciless place that rarely treats employees as human beings. The role of Human Resources has been slowly transformed over time to act not as a filter to attract or retain talent, but as a gatekeeper to ensure targets are being met no matter what the cost to personal lives.

Younger friends of mine make it impossible for me to look away from this cruelty that plays out constantly. One of them was asked to come to work three times a week after pandemic restrictions had begun to ease, even though her managers knew there was limited access to public transport. Another was accused of not spending enough time on online communication platforms, with the implication that he wasn't doing as much work as he was supposed to. A third was asked to take a salary cut because her office believed she was saving more by not having to commute.

The list has been long and heart-breaking, more so when one understands that younger people have fewer options than ever before. Our ministers may claim that things have never been better, but those of us with real degrees living in the real world know that this simply isn't the case at all. To not follow orders, irrespective of how callous they are, is to risk losing one's job to someone more than willing to make those sacrifices.

We have never really been a country that recognises or accepts the importance of a work-life balance. Our parents may have had fixed working hours, but I know very few people in corporate India today who can honestly say they are allowed to get in and out of their offices at a time they believe makes their lives comfortable.
Managers are encouraged to accept that staying long after 5 pm is the sign of a hard worker, and that those who choose to leave when they are legally allowed to aren't team players. Promotions are based upon this inane belief, and people sacrifice time with their families and loved ones because their priorities are forcibly rearranged by a system designed to place the success of shareholders above everything else.

Social scientists now point out that the pandemic has exacerbated these conditions around the world because the notion of working from home has compelled people to spend more time at their jobs than they did while they were physically present at an office. This won't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with how things work in India, but I continue to live in hope that the MBAs currently running our country's companies into the ground will one day wake up and recognise that working longer and working smarter are radically different things.

The pandemic taught me to take a long, hard look at what I was doing during my waking hours, and who my labour was truly benefiting. There was always someone getting paid a lot more for doing less, and this forced me to ask myself tough questions about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Millions of Indians don't have the luxury of choice. Ours is a society that still dismisses housewives as individuals who contribute little to the financial health of a home when they are the ones who do the most work.

A change of mindset is long overdue, and I continue to hope it will happen. I have no intention of waking up one morning in my sixties, only to realise that the largest amount of the time allocated to me on this earth was spent on making PowerPoint presentations.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper