Sad truth about working extra hours
The topic that I'm going to be discussing in this article can be quite a sensitive one. Most of the people are currently working from home. There are some companies that try to extract maximum work from the employees even in unethical ways. I have seen some of my friends and family members suffer because of such things. Even during some of the normal days or an ideal scenario when some of my friends get home from their workplace, they would still be asked to connect from home to check something or solve some issues. This was the situation even before lockdown. I understand that the job Nature of some people is always like that and it can never be prevented.
I guess that's just from the company perspective but I personally feel that boundaries can be set to any employment or to employees working in any nature of work. If it is someone working in 24/7 client support there again it is the responsibility of the company to hire enough resources for the work than making one or two employees do overtime working. The sad thing about this is that in most companies the employees who do overtime are not even compensated. I have to say that my wife is also one such victim. There is no time as to how many hours she works.
I have seen instances where people even work for more than 12 hours because of so many backlogs. The fact here is that the employees cannot even talk about this to senior management or someone in the company who could help. The reason is that they will be threatened to lose their job or treated with no appraisals or promotions. Many employees won't let this out just to not ruin their source of income.
Unfortunately the same happens even during the lockdown. I completely understand that when there is a need to work 12 hours and if there is a critical requirement, it is definitely okay to do that but such instances can be once or twice in a month. It shouldn't be the case every single day. People working from home during this COVID lockdown suffers this problem. Previously the number of hours people stay physically in their offices used to be the boundaries. But now as they are working from home, there is no restriction as such. Work is being extracted out of them for over 10 or 12 hours because it is easy for the companies to make them connect from their house itself.
How are employees cheated with this?
I guess it is not fair to put the blame entirely on the companies that extract work. In most of the instances, I guess the employees also play a major role in this. They are either cheated with some fancy schemes offered by the employer or by false appreciations. Companies take advantage of their employees and try to extract work from them by saying that they are the key resource and no one else could do that work better than them. These are some of the words that attract the employees so much and they give their best.
At the end of the day, the employees are not getting anything good out of this but they end up believing that everything was because of their achievement and they continue to be like this. The companies also give some best achiever award or something to motivate the employees to do this extra work continuously. This is the sad truth of some of the corporate companies and many people fall as a victim to this.
To conclude, I don't know how this can be solved in anyways unless the government comes up with some kind of labor law to prevent all these things. But most of these happen to like a secret mission without anything illegal and that's because the employees are supporting such things.
PS: I'm not trying to say that all the corporate companies are like this but just that there are a few companies that cross their line and the poor employees don't even know that their employer is crossing the line.
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I like to look at things from different views. But i think your post is more of the employee's view which is so legit. I want to see things from the employers view.
Every employer wants to make sure profit is made and if the people working for him is not able to meet up, i think the only logical thing to do is to find ways to have him make some profit of which one way is overtime. Think of it, if you had a firm and the employers were not finishing their task what will you do? You wilk probably incentives if they can finish faster too .
Finally, everyone should aim at financial freedom.. Good post @bala41288 . Although sounds like a rant
Oops, I'm not talking about extracting work out of employees with overtime just because they did not finish their work. My perspective itself is a bit different here. I'm talking about a situation where the employer runs the team with limited number of resources and make the employees work overtime without providing any benefits. Even in some cases benefits are provided but a little bit unethical to make employees work overtime and employees end up working overtime because they don't have any other option.
I'm also from the management side in my company and I understand it from the Employer perspective as well. In my case, if my team is running short of resources, I would demand my management to provide me with additional resources. I will not be making my team members work for me over time just because of the business demands.
And by the way if someone is working overtime because they like to work that way, that is absolutely their choice and I'm taking them completely out of the discussion.
Hmmmmm...