What does your office look like?

Corporate spaces are supposedly set to change in a post-pandemic world. What about your workplace?

The last time I had any kind of respect for my place of work was when I was on the cusp of adulthood. It was my first job, months after graduating from college, and I had been raised to think of an office as a place of seriousness that would give my life a sense of purpose. I was young and naive, so I bought into that elaborate con the way millions of us do and billions of us will continue to. As the years progressed, of course, my eyes and ears opened, leading me down that well-worn path of cynicism so many of us now trod through as middle-aged workers.

A decade in corporate India is five years more than it takes anyone to figure out that we give way too much importance to our offices. We accept their inane rules and regulations as sacrosanct, welcome the imposition of arbitrary punishments as our due, fall in line when Human Resource lackeys tell us to dress a certain way for festivals, and give away our hard-earned money in the form of dubious variable components that should be a legitimate part of our salaries. The biggest thing we give away, unfortunately, is our most precious asset: time.

I sometimes shudder to think of the years of my life I will never get back; years spent working 12-hour shifts at companies that gave me nothing of value in return. These weren’t fly-by-night operators preying on innocent folk either; they were established brands, powerful entities that millions of Indians aspire to work for. I was there, and I regret it, because they made me buy into the lie that putting in more hours meant being dedicated to my job.

As citizens of a third world country, we don’t have the luxury of a work-life balance that comes so easily to people living in the West. We accept harsh conditions as our lot from an early age, because that is how most of our parents worked, and their parents before them. It is only the rich who escape this yoke, along with politicians, who do less in a year than most of us do in a week. It explains why government jobs are still as coveted today as they were half a century ago. They are possibly the only legal refuge for the lazy, where the art of procrastination is rewarded with a pension.

The COVID-19 pandemic has opened a lot of eyes beyond our borders, showing people that there are other ways to make a living, none of which involve shutting ourselves off from family and friends or the genuinely important things that make a life. People have started to resign from firms that refuse to let them work from home, not because they are being obtuse, but because they have recognised that more work can be done in an environment of their choosing rather than one that requires them to commute for four hours and then lock themselves away for a further 10.

We need to evaluate what our own offices intend to do when we get that elusive all-clear. Will they respect our opinions as adults and allow us to function in ways of our choosing, safe in the knowledge that the goals and targets they set for us are met? Or will they continue to impose unrealistic demands that ignore how we travel and the inhuman conditions that sap our energies daily?

I recognise that it is always a lack of options that handicaps us and ties us to offices and jobs that are exploitative. I’m hoping things will be a little different this time around though, because even managers haven’t been spared by the pandemic. They have been forced to change how they work too, and spend more time with family than they possibly did before the virus showed up.

Maybe this time around, managers and the HR people who do their bidding at the cost of everyone else, will take a good look at company policies and what they mean from a humanitarian, rather than an economic, standpoint. I don’t have much hope of this happening, of course, because I have yet to work for a firm that values people over profit, but it doesn’t hurt to dream because change is the only real constant and life can sometimes be strange as well as surprising.

If I ever find a company that knows how to treat its employees with the respect they deserve, I’ll write about it here.

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.

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