Visty Banaji
India eagerly awaits a sixer Several organizations have moved to longer working days and many more are thinking of doing so. They are misled by ephemeral gains, while the damage to people and performance can be deep and lasting
The road less travelled
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he two armies fought a fierce battle that lasted the entire day. At the end of it, the invaders had overcome the well-positioned defenders and killed their king. There are many causes attributed to this outcome but the (contested) one we shall choose is the relatively exhausted state of the defending army, because of the hard battle they had fought and won against another invader just a few days earlier. If the loss of England in 1066 is not enough to warn you against tiring your employees by extending their working hours, I don’t know whether the rest of my augments will. But let me try anyway. My financially minded friends never tire of searching for quick (and sometimes dirty) ways to obtain more work with negligible cost increases. This was the thinking behind the old game of dropping in huge dollops of overtime in the hope of avoiding the fixed cost of additional manpower. It backfired badly when people found | APRIL 2021
ways to benefit from the overtime without making a significant increment in output. Seasoned HR hands still laugh about the many times workmen resorted to round-robin absenteeism or goofed off during regular working hours to ensure they got overtime without overwork. The current generation of get-profits-quick smart alecs are more focused on getting the same output at a significantly lower cost. Their first opportunity came with the Work From Home (WFH) imposed by
COVID-19. Why not make an emergency measure permanent and save hugely on office space and overheads by using employee homes instead, on an effectively rent-free basis?1 Progressive organization have thankfully swerved their corporate vehicles away from hitting the trust and performance damaging WFH cliff. Yet, now some of them are perilously close to falling into the ravine of the Longer Working Day (LWD). The argument that these longer workdays are made up through extended weekends
