Indians spend more hours working
By MALINI GOYAL TIMES NEWS NETWORK[
Feb 6, 2003
6.00 AM: Life feels good. My Blackberry buzzed - just bagged that $50 million order. It was crazy last night. Had been chatting with my US team till 11.00 trying hard to swing that deal. Life has been tough. I haven’t strummed my guitar for a long time. My tennis rackets are gathering dust. But I have enjoyed every minute of it. I was not keen on switching from that 9-6 old-economy job to the IT sector. But 200% increase in the salary was too much to resist. But it hasn’t been bad at all. It’s been tough on the family. Aparna hates it.15-days-a-month travel, 13-14-hour workday and busy weekends have taken their toll. I barely get to play with Aditya. But everything in life comes at a price. At 37, I am the youngest VP in the company. This nice big house, the brand new Accord, our holiday to Egypt last winter, I couldn’t have done all that if I stuck around that stodgy company. Hey, today is Aparna’s birthday. Will give her a good surprise. Will take her out for dinner. 5.00 pm: Its kind of crazy. The client in the US is frantic. Some network fault has affected our service delivery. Everybody is working on it. Oh my God! Have forgotten to pick up the birthday gift. Can’t even take her out for dinner. Boss wants me to hang around to get this job fixed. In fact if he has his way, he would have my bed fixed here. 10.00 pm: Aditya is sleeping. Aparna has had her dinner and is almost ready to go to sleep. Somehow, I always mess up on the special days. Santan Sharma, 37, a Gurgaon-based IT executive, is the sidebar in corporate India’s sizzling growth story. Servicing clients across three continents and many more time zones, Sharma has a demanding, but rewarding fast-track career. He has made compromises in his personal life, but has no regrets. Sixteen years of liberalisation has changed the face of corporate India. It has also changed the way executives work. Rigid hierarchical career tracks with their limitations and predictability are now becoming flexible, fluid bubbling with unbridled expectations. As a result, executives today are changing jobs, taking risks, staking virtually everything in their lives to pursue their dreams-big money and quick success-something they could not dream a decade back. “They are on a treadmill that is moving faster and faster,” says Govind Iyer, partner, Egon Zehnder.
Apr 14, 2003
It’s appraisal time and I am expecting at least 25% hike. I have an exciting offer - a nice desig and a good pay packet. Of course will be high pressure. Will wait for my hike to take a call. Yesterday, papa felt great seeing my salary slip - it’s already four times his salary. My IIM buddy Rahul called - he just landed a CFO’s job. We all are going places!! There couldn't have been a better time for urban educated jobseekers. Students out of school, barely in their colleges are being lured into workforce by an industry starved of talent. 45% of Genpact employees are under 25 years. They are also moving up fast. In Mumbai, Amit Khanna, 25, a procurement manager at a hypermarket sourcing goods worth over Rs 150 crore. At times he grapples, loses temper frequently - the enormity of his decisions often bogs him down. Typically such positions would go to more seasoned executives but retail industry, like many other emerging sectors, lacks that managerial bandwidth. Its tough, but its tougher to say no to those quick promotions and good money! Sandeep Srivastava, a Delhi-based auto industry veteran, remembers his former colleague at a Korean auto firm. Cheerful and always joking, he was smart and talented. “Then all work started getting loaded on to him,” he recalls. He was in office all day. Soon his smiles vanished. He started losing temper frequently. Something was going terribly wrong. Theoretically, companies have systems in place - office timings 9-6, alternate Saturdays off. But that stopped being relevant long back. “We actually offer incentives and create entrapments for them to stay back late,” he says. In the beginning, free dinner, a small incentive, was good enough to keep people back in office. But soon staying late became the norm. Srivastava knows why. When his western colleagues say they will take six weeks to complete the assignment the Indian team finishes in three weeks. “But at what cost - driving everybody against the wall, making them work during weekends,” he says. Last minute planning in everything - from meetings to presentations - makes things worse.
Sep 8, 2003
5.00 pm: I am feeling unusually tired. Don’t know what’s happening. Have never felt like this before. (At 8.00 pm Santan collapsed at his desk and was wheeled into a hospital. He was in coma and doctors could not figure what was wrong. In the next 30 days he has had two paralytic attacks - first on the left and then on right side. He was bed-ridden and couldn’t walk for three months. Doctors blame his hectic schedule, stress, lack of sleep and indisciplined lifestyle). The side-effects of the frenzied growth is beginning to show. Like Santan, most executives don’t wake up until its too late. Mukul Chandra, a private sector executive in an infrastructure firm in Delhi, was bed-ridden for four months. “Always on the move, lugging that heavy laptop around created havoc for my back,” he says. Travelling two-three weeks a month meant eating out, keeping odd hours and not getting enough sleep. Arjun Valluri, CEO, Lanco Globalsystems, has completely changed the way he works over the last one year, having suffered lot of pain due to slip disc. “I stand and work - 10 out of 12 hours” he said. Doctors - experts in areas like orthopadeic, diabetic, infertility, cardiovascular and obesity - all report a sharp rise in lifestyle diseases. (see box) “Its hitting younger people in much larger numbers than ever in the past,” says Sujay Shetty, associate director, life science practice, PWC India. In 2005, India lost $9 billion due to premature deaths due to heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Awareness is rising. Routine health checks are up. At Delhi’s Apollo Hospital, it has quadrupled from 6000 to 24,000 in five years. Perhaps all this is just the tip of an iceberg.
Feb 2, 2004
3.00 pm: Bad news in a row. Got a mail from my college friend Rajesh. He and Vishakha are getting separated. I could see that coming, but never had the heart - and the time - to tell them. The divide between them had just widened. With 12-hour workdays, the jet-setting couple barely had any time to spend with each other. Of course, both IIM alumni, and aggressively competitive, that competitive zeal showed up at home too. Those team-building getaways every few months, late night drinking sessions with colleagues, those brainstorming sessions with the overseas team, all that was bound to take their toll. Well, wasn’t I doing the same a few months back! Just heard from my sister in Bangalore. My niece is giving them a tough time. A bright kid in the IT sector, she thinks after spending close to 10 years building a career, keeping her personal life on hold, she has gotten nowhere. Younger guys are getting better salaries and faster promotions. She can’t concentrate, often breaks down at work. My sister is worried that her hopelessness and cynicism will turn her into a recluse. Long work hours and linear pursuit of success and money are having their effect. Delhi-based psychiatrist Achal Bhagat has seen at least 40% of the marriages he has been tracking ending in divorce. Officially, divorce cases in New Delhi have doubled in five years, with similar rises in Kolkata and Mumbai. Geetanjali Singh, 42, a media executive, is upset with her teenaged son. Last weekend he streaked his hair, went out with his friends and showed up around midnight. His cell was switched off and his parents spent a few frantic hours tracing him. “What we say does not mean a thing,” she says. Anjali Chabra, a Mumbai-based counselor, says visits by absentee parents seeking advice on wayward children are rising sharply at her clinic. The stress due to tight deadlines, peer pressure and intense competition is also evident in offices. The moment Sanjiv Rastogi, 27, a private sector employee, was promoted as a team leader last year, he became a forced loner. His erstwhile colleagues turned against him, often bitching behind his back. Eventually he found peace after switching his job. Harish Bijoor, an HR consultant, working with close to 80 firms, says there is a sharp rise in abusive language, physical brawls and nervous breakdowns at workplaces. Alcoholism and drug abuse are on the rise. Lifestyle diseases - from hypertension, diabetes, obesity, infertility - are on the rise among urban Indians. “Behind this hyper economic growth, we have painful stories of personal tragedies,” says Dr Harish Shetty, a Mumbai-based psychiatrist.
May 4, 2004
9.00 pm: I have been out of action for long. I get time to read, play some guitar. Its been great to have Aparna and Aditya around. Thank God I saved and she is working to keep the finances going. But I feel bad that not even once did my bosses and office people dropped by to find out how I was doing. My house was on their way to the airport – and it would have meant so much to me. I worked so hard for them. All those talks about caring for employees, those fancy gyms, elaborate cafeteria, that attractive HR spiel – its all useless. Gimmicks. All they care about is business, bottomline and productivity. Preoccupied, self-possessed, everybody is on a chase – bigger jobs, fatter pay packets, sky-high ambitions. “If I don’t call I will never hear from them,” says Ram Badrinathan, a globe-trotting executive who quit the chase in 2004 to become a consultant. Those Pink Floyd fans, literary society diehards – his smart multi-faceted friends have forgotten everything else but their job chase. It’s dangerous, he warns. At the end think about a time when that deal is not working, that corner room job isn’t coming. “They will not have any other hooks in life to fall back on,” he says. Companies are trying their best - gyms, free gourmet food, tennis courts, golf carts, swimming pools, lounges, libraries. Perhaps it is working well to hold workers in the offices, specially the younger ones. With businesses operating across multiple time zones, work hours have instantly got stretched, workers are feeling pressured and most companies haven’t figured how best to handle this. At one end of the spectrum, employees are registering their protest. At iFlex, executives recently put their foot down refusing to travel on weekends. At ICICI Bank, almost the entire treasury department quit as their boss drove them hard. And finally the company decided to fix the problem. But most executives are suffering quietly. Why aren’t companies waking up? They have been busy fighting too many wars,” says R Sankar, head, Mercer India. Srivastava, working with a consultancy firm, says “almost everyday we are adding new clients who are adding new businesses.” They all account for everything - technology, equipments, customer, logistics – but strangely not as well for talent needs. When you don’t get people, existing staff is asked to chip in. From starved of business during licence era to starved of talent – India Inc hasn’t yet absorbed the shifting dynamics of the corporate world. Mindset too hasn’t changed. Encouraging to stay late at work, monitoring the number of hours logged in, many bosses haven’t yet devised ways to track output rather than input, says Piyush Mehta, vice president (HR), Genpact. Further, the world of work has changed. People came to work, now work will have to come to people. Technology has helped work but not the workers. “Companies have to recognize this shift and bring in mobility-friendly policies,” says Aquil Busrai, executive director, HR, IBM India. Put bluntly – so far stress and overworked workers didn’t mean much to the company’s bottomlines. It’s beginning to do now as talent scarcity gets serious and impact of stress and burnout start showing up. If all this doesn’t work – competition will do the trick. Fighting for talent, companies are suddenly waking up to the need for employer branding.
Jan 30, 2007
10.00 pm: Life is limping back to normal. I joined work few months back, but still can’t walk properly. My company almost sacked me in 2004. It has given me a less-hectic job, but I know I have to get back to normal hectic jobs to be around here. After all, I am just a resource. I have to prove my worth every day.
By MALINI GOYAL TIMES NEWS NETWORK[
Feb 6, 2003
6.00 AM: Life feels good. My Blackberry buzzed - just bagged that $50 million order. It was crazy last night. Had been chatting with my US team till 11.00 trying hard to swing that deal. Life has been tough. I haven’t strummed my guitar for a long time. My tennis rackets are gathering dust. But I have enjoyed every minute of it. I was not keen on switching from that 9-6 old-economy job to the IT sector. But 200% increase in the salary was too much to resist. But it hasn’t been bad at all. It’s been tough on the family. Aparna hates it.15-days-a-month travel, 13-14-hour workday and busy weekends have taken their toll. I barely get to play with Aditya. But everything in life comes at a price. At 37, I am the youngest VP in the company. This nice big house, the brand new Accord, our holiday to Egypt last winter, I couldn’t have done all that if I stuck around that stodgy company. Hey, today is Aparna’s birthday. Will give her a good surprise. Will take her out for dinner. 5.00 pm: Its kind of crazy. The client in the US is frantic. Some network fault has affected our service delivery. Everybody is working on it. Oh my God! Have forgotten to pick up the birthday gift. Can’t even take her out for dinner. Boss wants me to hang around to get this job fixed. In fact if he has his way, he would have my bed fixed here. 10.00 pm: Aditya is sleeping. Aparna has had her dinner and is almost ready to go to sleep. Somehow, I always mess up on the special days. Santan Sharma, 37, a Gurgaon-based IT executive, is the sidebar in corporate India’s sizzling growth story. Servicing clients across three continents and many more time zones, Sharma has a demanding, but rewarding fast-track career. He has made compromises in his personal life, but has no regrets. Sixteen years of liberalisation has changed the face of corporate India. It has also changed the way executives work. Rigid hierarchical career tracks with their limitations and predictability are now becoming flexible, fluid bubbling with unbridled expectations. As a result, executives today are changing jobs, taking risks, staking virtually everything in their lives to pursue their dreams-big money and quick success-something they could not dream a decade back. “They are on a treadmill that is moving faster and faster,” says Govind Iyer, partner, Egon Zehnder.
Apr 14, 2003
It’s appraisal time and I am expecting at least 25% hike. I have an exciting offer - a nice desig and a good pay packet. Of course will be high pressure. Will wait for my hike to take a call. Yesterday, papa felt great seeing my salary slip - it’s already four times his salary. My IIM buddy Rahul called - he just landed a CFO’s job. We all are going places!! There couldn't have been a better time for urban educated jobseekers. Students out of school, barely in their colleges are being lured into workforce by an industry starved of talent. 45% of Genpact employees are under 25 years. They are also moving up fast. In Mumbai, Amit Khanna, 25, a procurement manager at a hypermarket sourcing goods worth over Rs 150 crore. At times he grapples, loses temper frequently - the enormity of his decisions often bogs him down. Typically such positions would go to more seasoned executives but retail industry, like many other emerging sectors, lacks that managerial bandwidth. Its tough, but its tougher to say no to those quick promotions and good money! Sandeep Srivastava, a Delhi-based auto industry veteran, remembers his former colleague at a Korean auto firm. Cheerful and always joking, he was smart and talented. “Then all work started getting loaded on to him,” he recalls. He was in office all day. Soon his smiles vanished. He started losing temper frequently. Something was going terribly wrong. Theoretically, companies have systems in place - office timings 9-6, alternate Saturdays off. But that stopped being relevant long back. “We actually offer incentives and create entrapments for them to stay back late,” he says. In the beginning, free dinner, a small incentive, was good enough to keep people back in office. But soon staying late became the norm. Srivastava knows why. When his western colleagues say they will take six weeks to complete the assignment the Indian team finishes in three weeks. “But at what cost - driving everybody against the wall, making them work during weekends,” he says. Last minute planning in everything - from meetings to presentations - makes things worse.
Sep 8, 2003
5.00 pm: I am feeling unusually tired. Don’t know what’s happening. Have never felt like this before. (At 8.00 pm Santan collapsed at his desk and was wheeled into a hospital. He was in coma and doctors could not figure what was wrong. In the next 30 days he has had two paralytic attacks - first on the left and then on right side. He was bed-ridden and couldn’t walk for three months. Doctors blame his hectic schedule, stress, lack of sleep and indisciplined lifestyle). The side-effects of the frenzied growth is beginning to show. Like Santan, most executives don’t wake up until its too late. Mukul Chandra, a private sector executive in an infrastructure firm in Delhi, was bed-ridden for four months. “Always on the move, lugging that heavy laptop around created havoc for my back,” he says. Travelling two-three weeks a month meant eating out, keeping odd hours and not getting enough sleep. Arjun Valluri, CEO, Lanco Globalsystems, has completely changed the way he works over the last one year, having suffered lot of pain due to slip disc. “I stand and work - 10 out of 12 hours” he said. Doctors - experts in areas like orthopadeic, diabetic, infertility, cardiovascular and obesity - all report a sharp rise in lifestyle diseases. (see box) “Its hitting younger people in much larger numbers than ever in the past,” says Sujay Shetty, associate director, life science practice, PWC India. In 2005, India lost $9 billion due to premature deaths due to heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Awareness is rising. Routine health checks are up. At Delhi’s Apollo Hospital, it has quadrupled from 6000 to 24,000 in five years. Perhaps all this is just the tip of an iceberg.
Feb 2, 2004
3.00 pm: Bad news in a row. Got a mail from my college friend Rajesh. He and Vishakha are getting separated. I could see that coming, but never had the heart - and the time - to tell them. The divide between them had just widened. With 12-hour workdays, the jet-setting couple barely had any time to spend with each other. Of course, both IIM alumni, and aggressively competitive, that competitive zeal showed up at home too. Those team-building getaways every few months, late night drinking sessions with colleagues, those brainstorming sessions with the overseas team, all that was bound to take their toll. Well, wasn’t I doing the same a few months back! Just heard from my sister in Bangalore. My niece is giving them a tough time. A bright kid in the IT sector, she thinks after spending close to 10 years building a career, keeping her personal life on hold, she has gotten nowhere. Younger guys are getting better salaries and faster promotions. She can’t concentrate, often breaks down at work. My sister is worried that her hopelessness and cynicism will turn her into a recluse. Long work hours and linear pursuit of success and money are having their effect. Delhi-based psychiatrist Achal Bhagat has seen at least 40% of the marriages he has been tracking ending in divorce. Officially, divorce cases in New Delhi have doubled in five years, with similar rises in Kolkata and Mumbai. Geetanjali Singh, 42, a media executive, is upset with her teenaged son. Last weekend he streaked his hair, went out with his friends and showed up around midnight. His cell was switched off and his parents spent a few frantic hours tracing him. “What we say does not mean a thing,” she says. Anjali Chabra, a Mumbai-based counselor, says visits by absentee parents seeking advice on wayward children are rising sharply at her clinic. The stress due to tight deadlines, peer pressure and intense competition is also evident in offices. The moment Sanjiv Rastogi, 27, a private sector employee, was promoted as a team leader last year, he became a forced loner. His erstwhile colleagues turned against him, often bitching behind his back. Eventually he found peace after switching his job. Harish Bijoor, an HR consultant, working with close to 80 firms, says there is a sharp rise in abusive language, physical brawls and nervous breakdowns at workplaces. Alcoholism and drug abuse are on the rise. Lifestyle diseases - from hypertension, diabetes, obesity, infertility - are on the rise among urban Indians. “Behind this hyper economic growth, we have painful stories of personal tragedies,” says Dr Harish Shetty, a Mumbai-based psychiatrist.
May 4, 2004
9.00 pm: I have been out of action for long. I get time to read, play some guitar. Its been great to have Aparna and Aditya around. Thank God I saved and she is working to keep the finances going. But I feel bad that not even once did my bosses and office people dropped by to find out how I was doing. My house was on their way to the airport – and it would have meant so much to me. I worked so hard for them. All those talks about caring for employees, those fancy gyms, elaborate cafeteria, that attractive HR spiel – its all useless. Gimmicks. All they care about is business, bottomline and productivity. Preoccupied, self-possessed, everybody is on a chase – bigger jobs, fatter pay packets, sky-high ambitions. “If I don’t call I will never hear from them,” says Ram Badrinathan, a globe-trotting executive who quit the chase in 2004 to become a consultant. Those Pink Floyd fans, literary society diehards – his smart multi-faceted friends have forgotten everything else but their job chase. It’s dangerous, he warns. At the end think about a time when that deal is not working, that corner room job isn’t coming. “They will not have any other hooks in life to fall back on,” he says. Companies are trying their best - gyms, free gourmet food, tennis courts, golf carts, swimming pools, lounges, libraries. Perhaps it is working well to hold workers in the offices, specially the younger ones. With businesses operating across multiple time zones, work hours have instantly got stretched, workers are feeling pressured and most companies haven’t figured how best to handle this. At one end of the spectrum, employees are registering their protest. At iFlex, executives recently put their foot down refusing to travel on weekends. At ICICI Bank, almost the entire treasury department quit as their boss drove them hard. And finally the company decided to fix the problem. But most executives are suffering quietly. Why aren’t companies waking up? They have been busy fighting too many wars,” says R Sankar, head, Mercer India. Srivastava, working with a consultancy firm, says “almost everyday we are adding new clients who are adding new businesses.” They all account for everything - technology, equipments, customer, logistics – but strangely not as well for talent needs. When you don’t get people, existing staff is asked to chip in. From starved of business during licence era to starved of talent – India Inc hasn’t yet absorbed the shifting dynamics of the corporate world. Mindset too hasn’t changed. Encouraging to stay late at work, monitoring the number of hours logged in, many bosses haven’t yet devised ways to track output rather than input, says Piyush Mehta, vice president (HR), Genpact. Further, the world of work has changed. People came to work, now work will have to come to people. Technology has helped work but not the workers. “Companies have to recognize this shift and bring in mobility-friendly policies,” says Aquil Busrai, executive director, HR, IBM India. Put bluntly – so far stress and overworked workers didn’t mean much to the company’s bottomlines. It’s beginning to do now as talent scarcity gets serious and impact of stress and burnout start showing up. If all this doesn’t work – competition will do the trick. Fighting for talent, companies are suddenly waking up to the need for employer branding.
Jan 30, 2007
10.00 pm: Life is limping back to normal. I joined work few months back, but still can’t walk properly. My company almost sacked me in 2004. It has given me a less-hectic job, but I know I have to get back to normal hectic jobs to be around here. After all, I am just a resource. I have to prove my worth every day.
posted by Nag @ 3:42 AM
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