The elusive work-life balance amid work from home

Mercedes Quintana, with her daughter Mila, 3, in tow, gets a work document while her husband, Eddie, works from their home office, in Temecula, Calif., on Jan. 13, 2021. Three mothers, in three different parts of the country. They are stressed, burned out, unraveling at the seams the coronavirus pandemic has exposed. (Brenda Ann Kenneally/The New York Times)

Recently, a group of young employees at Wall Street investment banking firm Goldman Sachs circulated a survey which said they averaged 95 hours of work in a week. They complained that these inhuman work hours affected their families and personal relationships and led to severe physical and mental stress. The majority of them said they were victims of workplace abuse.

Intensely-competitive investment banking space has always had plenty of dangerously overworked ambitious young staff. The pandemic and the work from home (WFH) culture has exacerbated the burnouts.

The wide adoption of WFH has induced important changes in social behaviour and practices across many businesses.

When the Goldman Sachs news broke, dozens of young people in the UK got in touch with the media to talk about how their work-life balance had shifted during the pandemic. The BBC reported the story of a 22-year old who joined what she thought would be a digital marketing job.

She found that she was typically putting in 12-hour days, six days a week. Plus on Sunday there would be FaceTime meeting with the line manager to discuss goals for the coming week. To seek time to spend with friend and family would mean displaying a ‘loser’s attitude’.

With multiple waves of the coronavirus infection hitting countries across the world, WFH is not just likely to remain well-entrenched, chances are that in many ways it will become a permanent feature of social life, signalling the demise of the social institutions of the office and office work. This will have significant social and psychological impact.

In India, WFH has been widely taken up by the information technology sector in the country, bringing in its wake significant social changes in IT clusters.

As a result, some excesses have been occurring in both India and the developed economies which have to be set right in order for WFH not to become socially harmful. In India, in particular, WFH threatens to become misogynic.

According to the sources in Bengaluru, India’s foremost IT hub, 80 percent of tech companies have adopted WFH and large corporations have only 10 percent of their staff going to office to manage data centres and tech support. As a result, IT workers on WFH are putting in longer hours – working far more than usual.

It is, therefore, not surprising that many IT companies are in the process of institutionalising ‘work from anywhere’ as the new normal. What is socially-significant is that with widespread adoption of WFH, the distinction between home time and office time has gone to a large extent. Under WFH, you are, so to speak, always on duty and on call. On the positive side, those following the WFH regime are able to take short breaks in between periods of work which can give a lot of beneficial flexibility to home routines.

Another new reality is that if at the start of the day you have been allotted a particular set of tasks, then you have to finish them before the beginning of the next day. On the other hand, if you were journeying to office daily as was the case before the pandemic, you could get up and go home at the end of normal workings hours even if the task allotted was not finished.

But the biggest downside of WFH is being faced by new parents with young children who find it difficult to split time between work and looking after children. This is particularly serious because all children have also stopped going to school and are attending online classes.

One source described the situation at his home thus. Not only is his older teenager offspring attending intensive online classes right throughout the day, even his three-and-a-half year old younger child is doing the same. While children are thus engaged, they still need minding and it is the mother who faces the most strain as while having to do the minding she also has to do her own office work.

The situation has become so unbearable that many young mothers who were till the other day proud professionals, minding both home and office, are taking a break in their careers. This is getting serious as it becomes the second break in their careers, the first one having been taken when the child arrived.

Across the country, women’s employment has taken a bigger hit than men’s during the pandemic. While rural and poorer women made up most of the national numbers in this regard, now it is the educated and professional women who have also been victims of the new culture.

There have been other changes. With children and grown-ups now all remaining at home and often getting into each other’s way, professional families in the IT sector have started to look for bigger homes. In Bengaluru, there is now a surplus of two bedroom flats and a keen demand for three and four bedroom flats. The paying guest business has collapsed. With 40 percent of the IT staff having left the city, an equal proportion of Uber and Ola drivers have put in their papers.

While these changes are affecting the home, the workplace or office is also undergoing a transformation. With IT firms offering ‘work from anywhere’ options, staff will henceforth barely ever go to office and the social ethos surrounding it will be gone. There will be little chance to properly get to know your colleagues. Perhaps most importantly, from the point of view of creativity, there will be no chance to spend a bit of time near the water cooler where many an idea is born while casually chatting with colleagues.

With pandemic rules restricting the number of people who can be at the office at the same time to around a third of what was the case earlier, many firms are giving up office space after ensuring the minimum requirements of safe distancing.

Another fascinating change that has taken place is many staff have relocated to their village homes where the quality of life is superior. As for connectivity, being technical people themselves, they have put up dish antennae to deliver sufficient bandwidth. This is leading to consumer spending getting spread more evenly between town and country.

Perhaps the most interesting is a sharp rise in apartment rents in Goa. Since you can now work from anywhere, many have chosen to stay and work out of Goa, in many ways enjoying the best of all possible worlds.