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The Right to Disconnect bill proposes to give employees the power to NOT attend to work after office-hours. If such a bill comes to pass, it would indeed be a tremendous turnaround in workaholic India.
I was eating dinner with my family and my phone buzzed. The call was from my then manager. I ignored the call, hoping to let it pass if it was a call by mistake (often not true though). The call jeopardised my situation on the table because I was lecturing my daughter the same moment to shut off TV at meal times. Because I got up to check the phone – mind it, I did not pick the call – she gave me a sly smile.
The merciless phone rang again after ten minutes. The manager apologized but got away with his summons to connect for a meeting the next morning at 8:30 AM. The time was most inconvenient for me due to the school-bus slot. Not just that, his emails with numerous attachments were waiting in my mailbox to be read, understood and answered. I cursed every possible person and thing and left the joint reading session with my daughter to her free will, burying my head in the laptop.
Does this sound familiar?
With the ever-connected office through smartphones and laptops, will it be easy to implement a bill like ‘the right to disconnection’ in India where most people in authority feel their inheritance to call or text liberally irrespective of the time? Countries like France, Spain, and Germany have implemented such bills in their legislatures, that define strict working hours.
Let us look in more detail at the proposal, impediments to the implementation and aftermath of this policy and if it would be worth a shot in our country.
The Right to Disconnect is a proposal that will leave power in the hands of employees to decide whether to pick an office-related call or answer a mail post working hours. National Congress Party leader Supriya Sule proposed the bill in Parliament in December 2018.
The bill demands that companies with more than 10 members constitute an Employee Welfare Committee to bring this right into implementation and ensure compliance too. For the organizations, it asks them to enlist the reasons for contacting the staff post office timing. For workers, it would bring relief if they have to be always on their toes and are under pressure to answer every work-related call, message or text. Business groups would still be able to call the staff but if an employee defers addressing the demand, no disciplinary action would be taken.
Who would not like an uninterrupted holiday? Yes, this bill would cover holidays too.
The right aims at helping citizens establish an equilibrium between work and personal life. With the ever-changing employment landscape and demanding jobs, the worn out workforce is constantly anxious to remain connected even if there is no need and keeps tapping the refresh button of mailboxes. The stretched working hours have influenced our health physically and emotionally not limited to lower immunity, headaches and sleep problems but extending to relationships too. The impact is not only visible on employees but their families struggle to come together and enjoy personal time. Hence, the bill has been proposed.
Indian corporate culture has mushroomed the mindset that equates extra effort and stretched working day to productivity and hardship. The employers and employees together should weed out such an unproductive tradition. Often, employees who slog for an extended period are considered more worthy of a promotion or hike compared to those who work in a fixed schedule with good results.
This assumption needs a long time and tremendous efforts to go away and any bill cannot simply change a stale thought as popular as this.
Ours is a fast-growing economy and most corporate sectors get the jobs outsourced from countries of Europe and America. In such cases, the employees are bound to work at an odd time for connectivity with distributed teams. Although such matters can be mitigated with flexible working timings, a major chunk of the millennials prefer to spend time in office rather than on any personal improvement agenda.
The workforce first needs to get it ready to adopt this proposal.
The work culture in India suffers from moody bosses who illustrate and practise authority at every possible opportunity, work ethics that value extending office hours and pushing the limits further on each matter to strive for success and sustain competition. No one wants to lag behind on time spent many are ready to bend and work extra for the petty benefits of allowances.
The Committee that is mentioned in the bill has to exercise the compliance strictly and the work ethos has to shift to neutrality in a highly competitive era.
Although the chances look remote, what if the bill is passed? There would still be bumpers in the execution path. The aforementioned Employee Welfare Committee should comply with the rule book stringently. The punitive process would take an unofficial form against the employees and can get a stamp of negligence or poor performance. The management would retaliate in ways that would appear genuine like retracting the perks, reducing the hikes and downsizing in the name of revenue and losses.
Most supervisors are managers and not leaders who want subordinates to follow at the blink of their eyes. These managers should move away from favoritism and understand the need for a balanced life for the staff members. The HRs can help in this regard to strike an agreement laterally.
Flexible job hours, connectivity from home or any other feasible place, compulsory leaves and enhanced employee engagement are some ways the extra effort can be compensated with if the need arises. Many organizations declare furlough leaves, which is a good step to manage the equilibrium.
Let us not forget the flip side which would favor the lazy folks who don’t move a finger easily. Even with long pending work, they would take undue advantage of this bill and make themselves cozy without answering the calls and might use the right against the lenient supervisors. Also, any mishap in the factories would not be addressed and any urgent issue that might cost heavy to the company would not be resolved timely.
There are many fields, which demand a high availability of the workers such as medical and media. The bill should accommodate such fields and has to consider both the parties.
France has been the pioneer in implementing such a policy—the Right to Professional Disconnection. A study in 2016 depicted that 37% of the French employees were using tools like a smartphone to connect with office beyond the working hours and 62% of them wanted formal regulations against this issue.
Although the government introduced the right, it gave the liberty to the business groups to choose and define the feasibility of this right mindfully based on the work shifts, weekend needs, and tasks involved in dealing beyond the borders to take care of the time lags. The companies with a headcount exceeding 50 are to follow this right and others are bound to release a guideline to their workforce.
While Germany does not have any such right officially, most organizations inherently implement policies similar to this for facilitating a work-life balance for their employees. Volkswagen and Daimler email servers were programmed in such a way that they refrained from emailing between non-working periods and holidays, respectively.
Countries like Italy and the Philippines followed suit to counter the stress in workers and for their well-being, they defined some form of disconnection policies.
The digital technologies which should have been a boon are proved otherwise blurring the line between personal and professional life. Digitization has a common ill effect of pushing the limits and going an extra notch. Apparently, that extra notch stretches until we sleep and shut out eyes after checking the mails as the last thing instead of sharing an anecdote with the family.
Unlike the European countries that already have strict labor laws and where the work time is around 35 hours a week, the employers in India clock between 40 and 45 hours weekly. India still has a long road ahead to compete with the developed nations, so such comparisons may not sound realistic too.
The bill gives hope to all those who give uncompromising importance to personal time but the employees have to be patient.
This article was first published here.
Image via Pexels
After a decade-and-a-half long IT career, Rashmi switched to professional writing as she could not resist her passion to lie weak and ignored anymore. So, she is nurturing her passion now as read more...
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