Life is about being at the office

We need to stop blaming companies for forcing employees to put in more than 10 hours a day. If corporate India promotes the notion that anything other than the generation of profit is a waste of time, we need to get on board. Representation pic/iStock

I have a lot of respect for the Big Firms. If you need to Google them, I refer to those intelligent accountants who swoop in whenever an organisation isn't doing well and sort everything out by recommending mass layoffs. I used to wonder why that was always the only solution they offered after billing clients for years, until I realised I was the problem. Sacking a lot of people to make shareholders happy just hadn't occurred to me. If I were working for those accountants, I had no doubt I would understand the wisdom behind their one-dimensional recovery plans.

The reason I mention these Big Firms is an unfortunate incident that occurred a few weeks ago, which ended up giving one of them some bad publicity. An employee passed away and, unfortunately for the company in question, the deceased's parent revealed why it happened. It had something to do with overbearing managers, unreasonable hours, and being treated as a statistic rather than a human being - in other words, a day in the life of most employees in India.

Soon after the letter leaked, that poor firm was forced to admit that an employee had died. They hadn't acknowledged it until then (no one from the company took time off from busy schedules to pay their respects), so I assume there must have been hurried meetings to come up with a plan for damage control. It was the same as every other plan for damage control because, if there's one thing the Big Firms do well, it is being predictable. One of their many PR agencies was presumably tasked with drafting a generic statement about how things would change any day now. Then again, since when is death allowed to get in the way of Key Result Areas?

What surprised me was how hundreds of people online began chiming in with their own stories of harassment, and how companies they worked for were all the same. Start-ups, media houses, MNCs - it didn't matter, apparently, because they were just toxic cesspools that placed productivity over mental health. I couldn't get over the comments, not because I didn't agree that working in corporate India has always been a nightmare, but because I naïvely thought some things would change after CEOs began putting up posts on LinkedIn about employee welfare. Could it be possible that they were lying to get likes?

A few days after that tragedy, when the noise had died down and managers had gone back to being sociopaths, I reconsidered my reaction and wondered if I had got the whole thing wrong. What if CEOs were right all along, and the rest of us just hadn't understood where they were coming from?

I was reminded of an honourable businessman from Bangalore. Everyone knows him and his family these days, because they are humble folk who avoid drawing attention to themselves. This gentleman built a giant technology company decades ago and had recently been advocating the importance of 70-hour work weeks. I assumed it was how he had built an empire, because history has always advertised the advantages of cheap labour. Then again, what if he was right, and had figured out that the only important thing in life was to spend every waking hour in an office?

The more I thought about it, the smarter it seemed. Imagine leaving for work from the suburbs at 7 am to avoid crowded trains or traffic on the Western Express Highway, starting work at 9 am, and staying put for the next 11 hours to avoid traffic on the way home. I began to see how living that way would slowly erase our need for anything else - family, recreation, leisure, or anything that required us to spend money. Doing this for a mere decade or two could make us millionaires.

Some people believe the death of a young person will compel Indian businessmen to examine their collective conscience and change how they do business. I, on the other hand, believe we need to stop blaming companies for forcing employees to put in more than 10 hours and start embracing the idea instead. If corporate India promotes the notion that anything other than the generation of profit is a waste of time, we need to get on board. And if this means we end up with a world where joy, entertainment and love are in short supply, we can still celebrate the fact that we may get a bonus at the end of each year.

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

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