Sanjeev Sanyal, economist, and a writer also condemned long hours at the office as silliness and a sign of damaging corporate governance. Sanyal, who is in the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council rebuked the attempts at embracing 80 hours working week especially in the American investment banks saying that corporate leaders have gone bonkers. Sanyal’s comments follow other comments that have been made in part by Larsen & Toubro Chairman SN Subrahmanyan who urged workers to be prepared to work up to 90 hours a week as well as be willing to give up their Sundays. In the suggestion made by Subrahmanyan and Kumar which contained such gems as “How long can you stare at your wife?” faced significant backlash.
Sanyal opined that the long working hours actually make problems by reducing the quality of work, and also destabilize faculty’s performance through propensities like bogus exercise or protracted lunch breaks in the facility, among others. He pointed out that such environments, as those on Wall Street or in the City of London exhaust everyone but the workers.
To this proposal by Subrahmanyan, Anand Mahindra the chairman of Mahindra group urged the participants to focus on quality rather than quantity as the latter claimed that one could do a lot in 10 hrs. HCL’s ex-CEO Vineet Nayar also felt of the asinine celebration of arduous working hours stressing that every human needs to lead a balanced life of work and play so that they can be innovative and have meaningful lives.
The debate started late October 2023 when the founder of Infosys, Narayana Murthy came out in the media recommending that youths should be willing to work 70 hours a week if they wish to compete with counterparts from other countries. His comment provoked further debate about some negative consequences of placing emphasis on increasing working time to detriment of quality working time.
