Extra Time
Today I read an article in Brand Equity about how women in advertising were finding it hard to move up in the corporate ladder. The article was focusing on one of the several contributing factors to this 'malady' and that being the long hours one has to put in. It said that more and more women were consciously avoiding top jobs, as they had to divide their time between their personal and professional lives.
I feel that this is true not only for the women in the ad biz but across all industries in the private sector. Also it does not differentiate between sexes. In a lot of work places one has to spend a lot of long hours because of the workload. Unrealistic deadlines, undermanned projects and deliverable overkills are usually the main culprits. In the IT sector, from where I draw my experience from, there’s another angle to this - time zones. People often have to work with their counterparts in different countries and that would inevitably mean conference calls either much before or much after the published working hours.
The article also mentioned a couple of ad bigwigs stating that they feel that people usually work long but that is because of they work inefficiently. According to them, one of the major reasons for this is peer-pressure. Again this is some sort of an epidemic afflicting almost all industries. But how does this peer-pressure build? There is no smoke without a fire. Evidently staying back at office is helping people in their professional motives. It offers managers a very easy measure of one's commitment, the longer the hours the better the employee is. And the success of the manager is measured on the basis of the hours he can manage to get out of his team. I have often heard judgments being passed on somebody based solely on the number of hours he spends in the office. Naturally, in an economy where job security is a myth, one has to match up to the 'high performing' peer who works for 14 hours a day. 'Efficiency be damned just stay at your desk!' Often it is an expectation that the employee would spend extra hours in the office. Some companies maintain that they inform the employee at the time of joining itself that he would be expected to work long hours. 'Extreme work culture', 'work hard, play harder', 'Stretch for the clients', 'My company, my project, my team, then me' are the usual euphemistic rhetoric you can hear from such companies. But is this justified? Is it that the companies need not have any respect for the private time of the employee? I am not sure about other countries but in our country this seems to be the case going by the alacrity with which an individual is told to sacrifice his private time for the company. What is worse is that he is given no choice and why should he be given any choice? If he won't do it, there are plenty others who would. This has gone beyond the simple demand-supply conventions; it is a question of ethics. There should be some respect for the individual's time and encroaching upon it should not be tolerated. Companies need to wake up to the fact that their policies encouraging, nay demanding, long hours are not just myopic they are almost anti-social as indicated by the article. But who will bell the cat?
I feel that this is true not only for the women in the ad biz but across all industries in the private sector. Also it does not differentiate between sexes. In a lot of work places one has to spend a lot of long hours because of the workload. Unrealistic deadlines, undermanned projects and deliverable overkills are usually the main culprits. In the IT sector, from where I draw my experience from, there’s another angle to this - time zones. People often have to work with their counterparts in different countries and that would inevitably mean conference calls either much before or much after the published working hours.
The article also mentioned a couple of ad bigwigs stating that they feel that people usually work long but that is because of they work inefficiently. According to them, one of the major reasons for this is peer-pressure. Again this is some sort of an epidemic afflicting almost all industries. But how does this peer-pressure build? There is no smoke without a fire. Evidently staying back at office is helping people in their professional motives. It offers managers a very easy measure of one's commitment, the longer the hours the better the employee is. And the success of the manager is measured on the basis of the hours he can manage to get out of his team. I have often heard judgments being passed on somebody based solely on the number of hours he spends in the office. Naturally, in an economy where job security is a myth, one has to match up to the 'high performing' peer who works for 14 hours a day. 'Efficiency be damned just stay at your desk!' Often it is an expectation that the employee would spend extra hours in the office. Some companies maintain that they inform the employee at the time of joining itself that he would be expected to work long hours. 'Extreme work culture', 'work hard, play harder', 'Stretch for the clients', 'My company, my project, my team, then me' are the usual euphemistic rhetoric you can hear from such companies. But is this justified? Is it that the companies need not have any respect for the private time of the employee? I am not sure about other countries but in our country this seems to be the case going by the alacrity with which an individual is told to sacrifice his private time for the company. What is worse is that he is given no choice and why should he be given any choice? If he won't do it, there are plenty others who would. This has gone beyond the simple demand-supply conventions; it is a question of ethics. There should be some respect for the individual's time and encroaching upon it should not be tolerated. Companies need to wake up to the fact that their policies encouraging, nay demanding, long hours are not just myopic they are almost anti-social as indicated by the article. But who will bell the cat?
posted by The Soulforged @ 9/28/2004
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