(Economic Times, 9th September 2001
Dateline India)
Family Matters
The Workplace is increasingly eating into family space.In this first of a series of articles, the auhor discusses the impact of long working hours on fathers. In subsequent articles she will discuss other issues.
Work Longer ,Tempers Shorter
Gitanjali Prasad
9 to 5 is
no longer an accurate description of the average executive's working day.
The USA has coined the 24/7 or 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, concept. In
a global economy, the competition is so intense, only the organisation that
is truly lean and mean will survive. If they're working longer hours in the
West, we have little option but to follow suit! Or so the argument goes.
It's hardly surprising that the stress and burnout are increasingly seen as
inevitable concomitants of an executive lifestyle. " In today's post-liberalisation
era, the individual is expected to cope with the increased stress solely on
his own. The work pressure, the working hours are all a given, so all the
individual can do is turn to meditation, walks etc", says Vidyanand Jha,
Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the Indian Institute of Management,
Calcutta. People are becoming one-dimensional and have little energy and few
interests. "Increasingly, if you ask people what they are doing on Sundays,
you will be told, 'I sleep on Sundays'", says Jha.
Very little research on the impact of work on family life has been done in India .In the West, however, there is considerable evidence to show that long working hours have a very adverse affect on the family. Executives on the fast track still are overwhelmingly male, Studies by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, UK show that men who work long hours are less likely to help in the house or take part in family social activities. Studies in the United States confirm that longer working hours increase tension levels at home, and cause problems in both the parent-child as also the marital relationship. There is considerable research to show that children exhibit less aggressive behaviour and do better academically when fathers are more involved in their activities. Rotraut Roychowdhury, a practicing psychoanalyst in Kolkata, cites the example of a doctor couple who both worked long hours and whose son started smoking at the age of 10 and was smoking 60 cigarettes a day by the age of 14. His parents, who lived in the same house, were unaware of this! Marriages too, pay a heavy price. If the woman is working she has to deal with a double dose of responsibility, DINS, or Double Income No Sex is the acronym that has been coined to describe this situation but apparently the situation is not much better for stay-at-home wives. "Men feel stressed out and the relationship deteriorates. Wives feel frustrated about the lack of sex and this activates the defense mechanism in the men, leading to irritability and quarrels" says Roychowdury who points out that in our culture, wives sometimes do not turn to their husbands for their communication needs, but they wait for the men to come home and take them out, unfortunately, it becomes more and more difficult for the men to do so. "The man feels 'I am taking care of everything on the job front, why can't you take care of everything that concerns the home?' But today's woman has been brought up to be far more demanding and she resents this".
But if the fall out of long working hours creates problems for both the working as well as the stay at home wife, it creates even more problems for the man himself. " Roychowdury says that her experience as a psychoanalyst bears out what research in the West has shown that "men's health and productivity are directly related to the amount of time they can spend with the family. Since even the 'friends' that men have in the workplace are colleagues with whom they discuss more work, men's emotional needs are completely blocked up, they respond very well to therapy, but are far more reluctant to seek it out," Roychowdhury says. Interestingly, Roychowdury would classify work related dinners as part of long hours men put in. "This makes it very lonely for the children who are alone in the house for long hours They sometimes get into undesirable company and often turn to pornography because of the boredom and the loneliness."
Is this
an issue in corporate India? Random conversations with MBA students and highflying
executives show that there is a huge gender divide here. Smriti Sinha, a first
year MBA
student at XLRI, Jamshedpur says that "balance is very important, most
people would like a job that would allow them growth as well as family time."
However, Randhir Malik, (not his real name) who is about to complete his second
year in an MBA programme at IIM Ahmedabad, feels that "at this stage
we are not bothered about long working hours, the salary, the potential for
learning, and location are what we would really consider." Similarly,
most male executives viewed the long working hours as a necessary concomitant
of a job on the fast track, it is the women executives who are going in for
options like a sabbatical to create time and space for the family. Ruchi Narendran,
a senior manager with a highly successful business group, is thinking of taking
a year off to spend time with her 9-year-old daughter. "Rather than performance
itself, it is how long you hang around that seems to be more important, it
is the lack of flexibility in the way our jobs are structured that forces
one to have to do this, organisations must realise that quality time and a
balanced life are important."
It is interesting, that while most of us imagine that in working these punishing hours we are following the West, this is simply not true. In the industrialised world, except for the USA, working hours are steadily declining. The Scandinavian countries take the lead with regard to family friendly policies, but even western European countries like France have legislated that the maximum number of hours middle managers may work should not exceed 35 hours a week, a move that has helped both the economy and the fertility rate! In 1996, the UK actually lost a court battle with the European Union and now has to restrict the number of hours that employees may work to 45 hours a week. Evidence is just beginning to come in that this has actually boosted employment even as it has reduced the pressure on the individual employee! Ravi Kumar (not his real name) is considering moving from a top accountants firm in Delhi to an UK based company because; "I will get weekends off and finish work no later than 7 p.m. Here, we often have to work till midnight virtually seven days a week."
The current economic climate has made job insecurity touch middle class India in a new and disturbing way. We do not have any social security and so for many employees, the ultimate horror is to lose one's job. VRS and ESS are given only by some companies, and will not meet the financial obligations of those who were in any case just about making ends meet. You go from being middle class to being poor. Another reason, why some people have to work increasingly long hours is that ". But perhaps even more compellingly, people spend long hours at the work place, because "face time" is the easiest measure of an employees commitment. In an era of increased job insecurity, it's something every employee can do, and what one executive does, his peers will match and top.
But surely it is only a matter of time, before this changes, as it has done elsewhere. A survey of 2,510 graduating students from 11 countries conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that 57% say that their primary career goal is achieving balance between personal life and career, (up from 45% just two years ago). Organisations now realise that to attract the best and the brightest, big bucks alone are not enough
Change will not come unsought and unbidden. Organisations began to seek ways to reduce working hours in the developed countries when they had to bear the brunt of marital break down and its fall out . The US census shows a 62% rise in single-father households in the last decade. Surely in this information age we can learn from the mistakes the industrialised world has committed without having to go that rather depressing route ourselves. The time to control working hours and initiate more family-friendly policies is now!
(Gitanjali Prasad is a free lance writer who has been writing on the family for over 15 years. She also studied the pressures of work on family life as a Press Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge.)
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