Like China, India also has a gruelling work culture

Jack Ma recently made headlines when he supported a tough overtime work schedule. China has had a work culture of long hours, often referred to as 996 — slogging from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. Tech employees there are now starting to push back, saying it kills creativity.

Do Indian startups have similar gruelling schedules? Many do. A number of employees even work on weekends and vacations. Founders defend it, saying that with investors and shareholders breathing down their necks, slacking off from aggressive expansion could mean the closure of the firm.

“Tiny Owl and Housing.com’s spectacular failures only heightened the pressure on the rest of us. When you are a startup competing with established players, you not only have to price lower, you have to work harder and deliver on shorter timelines to impress clients,” said a founder of a B2B marketplace that has secured its D Series of funding. “I remember chauffeuring my female colleagues at 2 or 3 am home because we had to work till late hours but didn’t have money for their transport.”

Those in the industry say Indians, both in big companies and startups, are becoming exactly like the Chinese and Japanese when it comes to killer working hours. “Look at private banks or telecom companies, even their employees work 9 am to 9 pm,” said Sarika Bhattacharya, CEO of Biz Divas, which works on inclusivity at corporate houses.

Long hours often seem to be “voluntary” as employees are rewarded through faster promotions, more recognition, and ESOPs. “If they are part of the founding team and are emotionally invested in the startup and founder, then it becomes their dream, their passion, and long hours become irrelevant,” Bhattacharya said.

Often, the problem in early-stage startups is that work roles are not clearly defined and as there only a handful of employees, each ends up performing a variety of tasks. Some may not be equipped to do those tasks, spending an inordinately long time to complete them. While some employees see this as new and all-round learning, specialists sometimes find it irksome that they are expected to be jacks of all trades. “I was hired to head their strategy and marketing. But soon I felt like the head of operations. Anything and everything would get assigned to me. There was lack of accountability, because everyone was doing everything, stepping on each other’s toes; there was duplication of work, errors and misses. It was crazy. I quit soon to go back to working for an MNC,” said a former employee of an agri-tech startup.

There’s also a bro culture that leads to late nights, which are an irritant for some women employees. A female employee at a startup said she had a young child and cannot work beyond 7-8 pm. “But I work very hard when I am in office. It seems very unfair that guys, who just lounge around and play table tennis in the afternoon and work late nights, nursing beers, are seen as putting in more hours in office and having greater ‘team spirit’,” she said. She logs hours at a coworking space, which has amenities like sleep pods, indoor games, gym, terrace gardens, and swings with plug-ins for laptops. “It looks very cool and fancy, but it’s just an inducement to work longer, and not necessarily more effectively,” she said.

It’s a culture where singletons with no commitments indirectly gain the upper hand over seniors who might not want to burn the midnight candle.

“Long work hours don’t mean higher productivity,” said Dr Aniruddha Malpani, an angel investor in the healthcare space, referring to companies which encourage or mandate this schedule. People burn out, he pointed out. “It’s like a race to the bottom. For knowledge workers, it’s a particularly stupid metric. How would one get inspired or be creative?” he said.

Some people, Dr Malpani added, are smart and start gaming it back by being physically present but mentally absent. “They know how to load the dice back in their favour,” he said.

According to Upasana Taku of digital payments firm Mobikwik, long working hours are generally more common in the initial years, but as a startup expands, people have a better work-life balance. “During the first two or four years, yes, people work six days a week and many a time, for 12 hours daily, or even 14 to 16 hours. But it’s not sustainable,” Taku said. “Also, as the company matures, it requires an experienced senior management and industry experts, who are not used to crazy hours. So then one makes more accommodative HR policies. Today, as a nineyear-old company, we work only five days a week.”

PayU managing director Jitendra Gupta agrees. “When I entered banking, everyone worked insane hours in Mumbai. Then, there was huge employee dissatisfaction; as a result of which, in 2010, some private banks moderated their policies. That’s why at PayU, we don’t have set work timings. People can enter and leave office when they want. It leads to higher accountability and more result-oriented work,” he said.

Nithin Kamath, founder and CEO of online brokerage firm Zerodha, said the company didn’t clock its employees. There are no swipes, no attendance. “When we were approached by investors and VC funds, we said ‘No’, as we always wanted to run this firm on our terms, including employee working hours,” he said.