90-hour work week debate: For and against, from Samir Arora, Harsh Goenka to Rajiv Bajaj, experts pick sides

90-hour work week debate: After Larsen & Toubro (L&T) Chairman S N Subrahmanyan sparked an online debate this week after advocating a 90-hour work week and suggesting that employees should even give up Sundays, D-Street analysts and industry experts have picked sides for or against the notion. From Samir Arora, Harsh Goenka to Rajiv Bajaj, among others, the work-life balance debate has stormed through social media across diverse sectors and domains.

Devina Mehra, Devina Mehra, the chairperson, managing director and founder of First Global advocated against the 90-hour work week. Mehra said, “After the comments by the L&T Chairman, S. N. Subrahmanyan on how he would like employees to work 90 hours a week and essentially hates the thought that they have any life at all outside work, let me repeat this as politely as I possibly can

This type of recommendation of working for ‘nation-building’ or ‘company building’ is bunkum and makes absolutely no sense

1. Research shows that increasing the number of hours of work beyond a point (and certainly that point is far before 90 hours) reduces productivity substantially. The human mind (or body) is simply not capable of focused, good quality work for that long – at least on a regular basis.

Not to speak of the toll it takes on physical and mental health.

Anecdotally, I remember from my days in Citibank which had a late working culture (barring exceptions like Aditya Puri who left at 5:30 sharp), many officers would while away time, say from 3-6 p.m., and then get back to work again to show their bosses that they were at the desks till 8:30 or 9.

It was a dysfunctional work culture and one that I steered clear of when I became an entrepreneur.

As an employer my focus has always been on output, rather than face time at work.

I have had very good colleagues who would try to leave by 6 p.m. everyday and still be productive; whereas others who stayed late would while away time with frequent smoking breaks, talking to girlfriends etc

2. Most people including the person making this recommendation have families, including children.

This type of working hours recommendation assumes that the man (it is almost always the man) who is working around the clock while his wife is taking care of the home and children. This was very starkly visible also from this book on Mr Narayan Murthy and Mrs Sudha Murty that I read recently.

Mr Murthy completely outsourced parenting to not just his wife but also Sudhaji’s sister and parents – So much so that the children thought of their grandfather as the real father and their father as only a ‘backup’ father. They also had no doubt that their father loved them less than he loved his company. Now of course it is all considered fine after the big payoff!

This was one of the reasons I found it a disturbing book.

Plus, this attitude means that most women would be precluded from this type of workplace and work culture; or at the very least, would have to give up dreams of having children (unless there’s a social revolution and Indian men become somewhat equal partners in raising of a family).

The women then can have a career OR a family with kids, a choice which all these men didn’t have to make.

3. More important, all data shows that no country has moved from low income to middle income without very substantial participation of women in the work force.

So, if the aim is to build the country and its economy, we need to attract more women to the workforce, not less.

Hence, the 90 hour week is not the prescription that will take the country to the next level.

This much is basic, but there is a deliberate blindness to this among even well-educated men!

4. The social fallout of this culture in Korea & Japan which required people to hang around the workplace all day every day is that the women in those countries decided the sensible route was not to get married at all and the birth rates in those countries have plummeted to far below replacement levels

5. Having said all of this, while I do not believe in long hours in office necessarily, the fact is that if you want to really be skilled in something like equity research or any other real knowledge area you needs to put in those 10000 hours of work to really learn the skill.

This means reading books, maybe doing courses from universities in your own time and so on. Without that you would not be at the cutting edge. So at the very least in the initial years you would need to put in the hours which may not be in office but on learning.”

Helios Capital founder Samir Arora waded into the ‘90-hour work week’ debate on Friday amid growing growing outrage on social media platforms. Controversy erupted earlier this week after a video showed Larsen & Toubro Chairman SN Subrahmanyan calling for extended hours and suggesting that employees should give up their weekend.

“Yes. In the beginning one has to work harder than others to learn, get noticed and get ahead. In my first job after IIM, I worked in Delhi where my hours were routinely from 9 AM to around 10 PM and about an hour each way for travel. I enjoyed it a lot but still sought a job with more sane hours,” Arora recalled.

The IIM graduate said that he had eventually transitioned to a new job where people worked from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm and often “started thinking about leaving” an hour early.

“It was so boring that I went back to my earlier firm once again,” he added.

Arora also noted that he truly enjoyed working with Alliance and Helios in more recent years — so much so that he did not “count it as work 95% of the time”.

“Bottom line : It is not right to say that the CEO/promoter is working 70 hrs because he is the owner and gets paid much more etc. You have to ask, why that person was able to become CEO or First gen promoter or whatever in the first place. Your choice,” he added.

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