Being accessible within two shakes of a duck tail signals that you are not occupied, which often equates to being not-so-important in the office hierarchy. Unfortunately, though, India Inc’s love for busy bees is a buzz killer.
How often have you opened work tabs, pretence-typed gibberish on a Word document just as the boss happens to pass by? Micro-seconds ago, you may have been lost in rumination, but it would not have gone down well with the person you report to.
Why? Because catching you ruminate may have made the boss wonder various things. Is there insufficient work on your Key Result Area (KRA) template? Or have you lost interest in your work? Turned quiet quitter and disengaged? Are you planning to quit the job? And how does an apparently idle person at work reflect on the boss?
Ironically, you may in reality be a high performer who decided to spend some time staring into space—and yes, during office hours. But, for a fraction of a second, your stock may have sank on the choppy bourse we are familiar with as the ‘Boss’s Radar.’
For most of us busy or not-so-busy at work, getting a job was a natural step after our education, and for many of us , a higher education followed the regular school curriculum.
The competitive pressures and bills to pay meant never getting a chance to take a ‘gap year’ off, or even some time off the work schedule to travel, or even a short breather. Sabbatical policies are still rare and new.
They are often taken by those who not just need a break, but also have sufficient funds to go for a long stretch of time without pay. For most, even a gap between jobs is worrisome, so being busy and acing the art of juggling work with more work is the only way to show productivity.
And this is where we seem to be faltering.
We are directly linking being busy with being hard-working. This is expected to result in productivity and therefore salary hikes and promotions—the road to success.
Meetings are typically scheduled in succession and there is little cross-functional work because there is no “free resource available” and everyone is busy.
But what if all this hard work never pays off? It is possible that promotions are biased, your productivity gets slotted in the middle of the bell curve as average, and your reward path is less promising that you had once estimated.
If that is the case, then you have lost out on a precious golden hour of idle time that could have been rewarded with a few chuckles, or some perspective, or thoughts that may have helped untangle some of those meshes in the mind.
In a 2010 paper called ‘Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness,’ researchers Christopher K. Hsee, Adelle X. Yang and Liangyan Wang write: “There are many apparent reasons why people engage in activity, such as to earn money, to become famous, or to advance science. In this report, however, we suggest a potentially deeper reason: People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy.”
Through experiments, the trio of researchers established how people found ways to keep themselves busy. For many, being busy could mean an engaged mind and a happier life.
During the covid pandemic, a period of health uncertainty coupled with heightened job insecurity meant a compulsion to frequently be on video calls and show the bosses that one was not slacking off while working from home.
With tension in the air even across distances, firms upped their empathy quotient during those grim days, but the extent to which it made a truly sustainable difference is debatable.
And now that employees are back to scurrying around office floors again, the pace of work at offices appears to have become faster. Words like ‘guzzle,’ ‘frenzy’ and ‘hectic’ are liberally used in offices, and the rise in their use is a sign of how frenetic work lives are becoming, with little or no space for a pause or moment of idle time.
Today, many employers are wrestling with absenteeism and clashes between generations whose understanding of what is expected of an employee appears to be at some variance.
While many of us were trained to trust that hard work equals commitment and that one needs to put in as much time as one’s job demands, younger lots of employees seem keen to turn this long-established paradigm around in favour of far less pressing work routines.
Perhaps employers need to acknowledge that employees who juggle too much work for too long are likely to drop the ball at some point . Being ‘busy’ all the time could actually be a sign of extreme fatigue setting in. This could be leading to quiet quitting, a phenomenon that serves no company well.
Then again, empathy can make a difference. Work superiors should acknowledge that taking a breather is not being idle. One could privately be raring to go for the next project. Or just lost in thought. And both could be of value to the employer.
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