Opinion
Manu Joseph: Narayana Murthy, Subrahmanyan and Jamie Dimon miss something simple about work
Summary
- The passion of workers, unlike of bosses, isn’t work. In fact, work is so dreary that they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t pay. Business leaders often forget this.
About 20 years ago, the five-day week was not common in India. Some people in an office in Mumbai approached their boss to demand it. The boss said he had no problem with this very modern global idea; he would ask the proprietor. But, he said, they should know what the owner would probably ask. “So the work that takes six days now can be done in five?" If the answer is ‘yes,’ he would consider the office overstaffed, proceed to sack 17% of the workforce and retain the six-day week for those who survive.
I don’t think the boss was exaggerating. This is how most owners think even today, notwithstanding the fact that they have made peace with the five-day week. They want people to work hard because they believe that’s what workers should do. And ‘work-from-home’ is not their idea of work.
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A few days ago, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase, rebuked his employees for resisting his demand to end work-from-home and return to the five-day week system. Over 1,200 employees had signed a petition asking for more flexible working hours.
In an address to the bank’s employees that was leaked on the internet, he is heard saying that they were too distracted on Zoom, “…looking at your mail, sending texts to each other… I call a lot of people on Friday… not a goddamn person to get a hold of… I can’t stand it anymore… I come in and I’m like, ‘Where’s everybody else?’... We didn’t build this great company by doing that. By doing the same semi-diseased [bleep] that everybody else does."
Now and then, an Indian business patriarch would say Indians should be working long hours in office. Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy said Indians should work 72 hours a week. S.N. Subrahmanyan, chairman and managing director of Larsen & Toubro, said people should work 90 hours, including Sundays. Founders and other stakeholders who ask their workers to work long hours offer themselves as examples—see how much we work, they say.
This is baffling because they appear to miss something simple about work.
Entrepreneurs, like artists, love what they do, or most of it, or why they do what they do. They suffer when they are on vacation. They have to apply discipline to stop working some days. In fact, that is what discipline is. It is a preventive mechanism that the world has misunderstood. It never works if you need it to do something; discipline helps in stopping you from doing something you love too much. People who are forced to exercise cannot be helped by discipline; runners addicted to running use discipline to reduce runs.
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What many business leaders don’t seem to understand is that their passion is not the same as what workers call ‘work.’ Work is usually so dreary and repetitive that no one will do it if they are not paid for it. A salaried person can only take it in moderation. Many of them like their home only because they have an office to compare it with. Whenever they are in office, they want to be elsewhere.
Time and again, there’s a rebellion against the very idea of office. Now and then, technology promises to abolish it. And each time, the office wins, because bosses like the office and they want everybody to show up, because it is through the physical presence of the others that they fully understand what they are the boss of.
People keep rebelling against the office, but the rebellion never gets them freedom. It just makes slavery more lucrative. You may argue that work-at-home is a major blow to the idea of office and businesses are struggling to get workers away from what’s actually a compassionate idea. The fact is, a compassionate idea does not triumph because it is compassionate. Instead, it triumphs when it makes economic sense.
Work-from-home began to take shape long before covid. Big companies wondered if they needed to maintain huge expensive office spaces in expensive business districts. In fact, about 20 years ago, IBM gave its employees financial incentives not to come to work. The idea was that the company would save money per employee if many of them shared a seat by making their presence scarce. After covid, the idea of work-from-home appeared to be the future, but this column had predicted even then that the office will finally prevail.
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Many entrepreneurs seem to think there is a correlation between long hours and output. I find that naïve. Maybe most of them have never really been worker ants before. Salaried people who spend long hours in an office are usually of three kinds. A city like Mumbai has a lot of the first kind, especially at the bottom rungs. They come very early; they even go to work a day after, say, a bomb blast. But that’s because most of them live in such tiny crowded homes that their office offers relief. It is a leap in the quality of their life.
I used to work in an office where the peons, guards and even clerks clocked in very early to have a bath and use the toilets, for which they would otherwise have to stand in queues back home. Also, singles spend a lot of time in office because they don’t have a home life—the reason I got to know that people came early to have a bath.
The third group of people spend a lot of time at work because they are doing other work. For instance, there was a place where I was clocking 16 hours every day because I was working on my novel. There is a fourth category, which includes most Indians. They clock long hours but don’t do any work. They just drink a lot of chai and chat. They can even do it 90 hours a week.
The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.
