Absent in the “work 90 hours a week” debate
We don’t have meaningful work that requires 90 hours a week. Most work is repetitive or dependent on others.
Our country is obsessed with counting hours. Everybody asks the school topper: “How many hours a day did you study?” Journalists shove their microphones into the faces of UPSC-toppers: “You must be studying 16 hours a day, no?” And now employees are being asked: “How many hours do you work in a week?”
The reason is simple.
At one level it’s a hangover from our socialist days. The principle is “your one hour is equal to my one hour, as we both are just labouring, we are both blue-collar”. Hence it becomes a standardised measure of effort. IQ is anyway an evil capitalist construct. As for new-age IT services companies that continue to count hours, that’s what they export — billable hours. And it’s no surprise they want to maximise this.
The L&T chairman’s exhortation, to work 90 hours a week, comes in a different context. Ironically, for the last seven days, people have spent 90+ hours outraging about it trying to prove him wrong, thereby proving him right.
I understand where he was coming from. Many corporate leaders like him are hard workers, usually with little or no familial inheritance, who realised education is the only key to prosperity, who burnt the midnight oil, who used Resnick and Halliday as a pillow, cleared competitive exams, built great careers, achieved a designation which is an acronym, even as they lost some hair and empathy. As they climbed the ladder, they grew to dislike (though they didn’t always show it) non-hard-working people or those who spent their time away from the assembly line. When a journalist asks them why 90 hours, they bring up India’s low per-capita-income numbers and cite how people in China follow the 9-9-6 model, where they work 9-to-9 for six days a week. They can’t imagine a developing country — with a four-figure per capita income — doing anything less.
The key miss here is that they almost can’t fathom the existence of non-ambitious people, those who don’t want to conquer the world, who just want to reach home on time and watch episodes of Bigg Boss with their family. There are plenty of people like that, as there should be. It’s a natural distribution. A bell curve of ambition.
There’s also a larger flaw with the measure itself. If I pay my driver based on the number of hours he drives me, he would prefer a bullock cart to take me to the office instead of taking my BMW (unless you stay in Bengaluru, where it will likely take the same time). There is no reliable measure of productivity in an office. You can still track projects on a macro level, but to break it down for an individual employee is very difficult, hence everyone goes for a convenient marker — number of hours.
The Factories Act, and various Shops and Establishment Acts, limit weekly hours to 48. An ILO study says Indians work 47.7 hours on average every week. Some of them are sending rockets to the moon in those 47 hours and some are fixing the five software bugs introduced by their colleague’s bug fix the previous week. An Indian software engineer is the biggest job creator for other software engineers. I should know; I was one.
In current times, where Elon Musk is the new governor of the world, the questions are being asked differently. When he acquired Twitter, he asked the CEO: “What did you get done this week?”
It was treated like a slur by the work-life balance enthusiasts across the board, as this week was spent preparing the proof of the work we did last week, on beautiful slides, to be presented in a boardroom to the CEO; 70% of the time in a corporate job is spent in preparing for meetings.
And this is the truth. We don’t have meaningful work that requires 90 hours a week. Most work is repetitive or dependent on others. Being a services-led economy, most of the time in most jobs is spent waiting — waiting for clients, waiting for other teams to finish their work, waiting for approvals. You can’t send gentle reminders every 10 minutes. So people pretend to work long hours. Like the colleague scheduling an email to be sent at 1 am, just to pretend they were working late. It’s a race to the bottom.
The real challenge is creating worthwhile work which requires 90 hours of dedicated effort every week. It happens when you build something, you manufacture something, racing against time, trying to beat a target. Ironically, the ones who will create those jobs are the ones who jumped off the assembly line; the odd ones, the ones who were seen with scorn by the bosses mentioned here.
Often the backbenchers build the biggest companies, who then hire such CEOs, who miss the point that the only way one can work on something with full dedication for 90 hours a week is when one feels like an owner of the stuff they are working on. Your job as an employer is to create that environment. Not just in perception but also in reality. The ones who are driven will work any number of hours, without being given a number. The rest will schedule emails at 1 am.
Abhishek Asthana is a tech and media entrepreneur, and tweets as @gabbbarsingh.The views expressed are personal