Some recent remarks by senior IT leaders have ignited fierce discussions about how many hours an IT professional need to work. Several senior leaders, film personalities, sportsperson and other experts have shared their thoughts on this subject. In this article, I share the views of a person who has seen both sides of the world (from being an Individual contributor to a leader). In my view, this comes down to four factors- Mindset, Quality Vs Quantity, Individual Choice and Employee Wellness.
- Mindset- The whole services industry grew on the basis on what we call Time and Material model. You work for certain number of hours and get paid on a pre-determined rate. Several other business models such as Fixed price, Fixed Outcome, Risk-reward etc., were proposed time to time, but T&M still dominates the services market. Several of the early-stage IT companies just kept getting bigger and bigger by adding more and more people and billing them for more and more hours. This became a routine, then a culture and then a mindset. Even in the age of Gen AI, AI and various other advancements, these companies and their leaders could never give up their mindset and end up making comments about how many hours a person should work or not work.
- Quality Vs. Quantity- This “number of hours” mindset gave rise to another problem. That was of the quality of the deliverables. As people get into this “machine” mindset of working more and more hours, their creativity and out-of-box-thinking goes down and they just become followers of what we call “processes”. True, these processes brought stability and structure to the outputs, but the gains were negated by having people work outside of their productive hours. Every company needs creative, thoughtful, and wise decision makers, not just process followers.
- Individual Choice- 40 work hours in a week is a global standard. Whether I should work 10 more hours on top of that, 20 more hours or 30 more hours – it’s purely my choice and decision. Nobody has to come and preach me on that. I saw statements by some leaders saying that some extra working hours are necessary for some critical projects. While that is true, but who decides the “criticality” of the situation? Customers? Delivery Managers? Account Managers? Should it be not decided by people who are actually working on the project? Should companies not enable their employees to take decisions in this regard? Every IT professional is a well-educated person, and they need not be taught the “importance of the project” to extract extra hours from them. Let the individual decide.
- Employee Wellness – The death of so many IT professionals at young age by heart attack are not isolated events. They all somehow connect to the points made above. Our so-called managers most of the time mismanage and give little respect to an Individual choice, wellbeing, family priorities and other factors that contribute to the overall mismanagement of their employees. This trend must change. Fortunately, there are several new age companies (Including the one that I work for currently) have realized this long back and they run several programs, incentives, interventions for overall employee wellbeing.
This should be a learning for all IT companies and discussion should focus on how to make our employees most productive, most healthy, most involved, most committed and most customer centric, rather than how many hours one should work.
Disclaimer – The views published in this article are solely of the author and does not represent the views of the author’s current or previous employers.
