The President of the Society had in his column in the March
2010 issue of the BCA Journal, brought the attention of readers to some of the
rare qualities of CA Aditya Puri (the Managing Director of HDFC Bank who had
recently won a prestigious award), particularly his time management skills which
help him to leave his office every day at 5.30 p.m. The President had requested
readers to apply their thought on that aspect, considering the fact that
Chartered Accountants — both in practice and in employment — are generally prone
to working late. Taking the cue, the author tries in a lighter vein to analyse
the culture of working late which has now spread to almost all sectors of
commercial activity in the country.
Globalisation has brought many things to India, and working
late is one among them. Not that we Indians are not used to late working hours.
We do work late when need arises. What is new is the culture of regularly and
compulsively working into the late hours of night. Those working in today’s
so-called sunrise sectors are always seen working well past sunset. For them
apparently the sun only rises, it never sets.
Some are sceptical — and sometimes even a bit suspicious — of
people working late. Probably they carry such thoughts out of their past
experiences. When there are different views on the virtues and weaknesses (not
necessarily vices !) of working late, it will be good examining the different
aspects of late working.
The common impression that a person working late — or an
organisation that encourages employees working late — conveys is that they are
so busy and overloaded with work that they cannot complete their work without
putting in longer hours. But on closer scrutiny one often finds that this is not
true. Organisations which follow the modern (read American) management-style
employ less people than what is required, so that they can pay higher
remuneration to employees without increasing their total wage bill. As a result,
their limited number of employees are forced to slog it out. It is with this
aspect in mind that management schools train their students to study and work in
sleep-deprived environment without losing their senses. Most business
enterprises are not bothered by studies that show that deprivation of sleep
adversely affects the productivity of employees.
Even in the modern business organisation where the office is
always open late into the night, and all employees are present, it is
questionable whether everyone is actually working. When employees working in
frontline IT companies say that everyday they work from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. and so
on, one is naturally a bit curious. If one asks an employee, in confidence, what
exactly is the work that is done late into the night one can expect a reply
somewhat like this : “I actually work for 3 or 4 hours maximum. The rest of the
time I am awaiting my senior’s instruction to start working with him. My senior
is always doing something unrelated to work, and mostly roaming around.
Everyday, right from morning, I ask him at intervals of a couple of hours ‘Shall
we start ?’, but every time he replies, ‘No, wait’. Finally, by 8 p.m. or so, he
asks me to join him, and we start working. No wonder we will reach somewhere
only by 11 p.m.” This is found to be the case with many people working in the
so-called emerging businesses. The blogs of employees in the Internet too
confirm this.
Even if it is not the policy of an organisation to make every
employee regularly work overtime, employees do sit up late for different
reasons. The obvious reason is to impress the bosses. But there are less obvious
reasons too.
For some habitual late workers — whether employed or
self-employed — their work-place is not their ‘second home’ but ‘first home’
itself. These unfortunate guys do not get peace of mind in their homes for some
reason, and so they remain in offices as long as possible to minimise time spent
at home. What they do at their offices in the after-hours is anyone’s guess —
chatting with friends on or off phone or net, partying (with or without booze),
reading and sending out unnecessary emails, browsing the net or taking a nap. If
possible, they encourage lot of visitors to their offices after office-hours,
thus converting the office into some kind of a club. Some carry the idea of
‘home’ to such an extent that they actually have a bed too in their offices. In
such cases, the public cannot be blamed for suspecting something.
The accounting profession is famous for continuing to work
after everyone else has gone home. But accountants working late are sometimes
viewed with suspicion too. There is the story of a chief accountant in an
organisation who was working well past midnight everyday. The accounts were,
however, very much in arrears. The late sitting was also justification for the
accountant to come late — by late afternoon — everyday. He thus reached the
office when everyone was preparing to leave, and he was working all alone
(presumably) all through night. When there was a change of management, he was
told to follow regular working hours, and an inquiry was made into the accounts
being maintained by him. As skeletons started falling from every cupboard, the
chief accountant was fired.
To be fair to those working late, all of them must not be
equated with the accountant in the above story. Not everyone is doing illegal or
unnecessary things — or entertaining themselves — while burning midnight oil.
One of the reasons is that not everyone is competent enough to handle different
types of work during normal working hours. Many bank managers, for instance,
cannot gather the mental concentration required to scrutinise loan applications
or monitor their non-performing parties during normal hours when they are
attending to customers. They therefore sit up late to do those jobs. Such
employees deserve sympathy, not scorn.
Some others overburden themselves, as they do not delegate
work. For many in this category, the problem is that they do not trust any of
their subordinates. For some others, it is a way of making themselves
indispensable. They follow the age old maxim : ‘Keep things pending, so that the
pending will keep you’.
At the other extreme there are those who do not trust themselves but trust their juniors completely. They delegate all their work and go about doing practically nothing. They will, nevertheless, be present in office until everyone leaves so that their enviable style of working will always remain a best kept secret. How do they kill their abundantly surplus time?? They devise all sorts of ingenious methods. Presiding over or participating in endless meetings is a time-tested trick. Meetings are now referred to as training sessions, presentations, seminars, workshops and so on. Whatever the nomenclature, they serve the purpose of the wandering late worker by consuming his surplus time. The worst part of these workshops is that they take away a lot of time of the productive employees too. Sometimes, to keep the subordinates engaged, the inefficient senior makes them do dummy projects without saying so, or ask them to submit several lengthy reports on work already done.
In today’s IT-enabled environment, working late within one’s office is not always necessary. For the Chief Executive and other senior executives, there is no such thing as ‘working hours’ as they have to be available on call on a 24/7 basis. In the case of the lower-rung executive too, he can work from home or anywhere else — while on the move too. Even team assignments can now be carried out by persons sitting at different places. That being the environment now, regularly working late in one’s seat in office has become practically unnecessary. Not surprisingly, a few organisations have started discouraging late working — disabling computer servers, ordering closure of offices and switching off of mains at a specific time to push out die-hard late sitters.
Having thought of some of the aspects of late working one can only warn both individuals who work late, and organisations that encourage employees working late, to determine whether the late working is really necessary, productive and economical. If it is not, then trying to merely create an image through late working will not be rewarding in the long run.
