Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy, recently stressed the importance of ‘hard work’ for countries to achieve productivity. Quoting examples of Japan and Germany, he mentioned that workforce in these countries worked hard and for longer hours during the aftermath of wars, for these nations to have become successful.

Given that India’s productivity is low in comparison to global benchmarks, he stressed that Indians, particularly the younger generation, need to work harder and for longer hours of say 70 hours a week, in order to be able to compete with the global big-wigs. The issue of ’70 hour work week’ has percolated into a nationwide debate.

If we purely go by the spirit of what was said by Murthy, it makes a lot of sense; without the ‘pain’ of hard work and efforts by the employees, the nation isn’t going to progress! But, whether the employees need to work for longer hours of ‘regulated’ work is of course rightly debatable.

Most of India currently has a 48-hour work-week. While it is important for the employees to be physically present at workplace for the ‘regulated hours’ for sure, any attempt to increase the working hours is being met with a strong retaliation from the employee unions.

Work-productivity relationship

A number of studies that have explored the relationship between working hours and productivity show that, as the number of working hours’ increase, the productivity drops.

In today’s knowledge economy, the employee has become the most important asset any organization owns. Post-pandemic, there has been a dramatic shift in the employee mindset; the concept of work-life balance is emerging as a serious priority, both globally and in India.

Contrary to extending the working hours, countries like United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Scotland, Spain, etc., have been contemplating and testing the four day working week without reducing the compensation and benefits.

As Gary Hamel questions, in his book, ‘the future of management’, what percentage of ‘themselves’ do employees bring to the company? His research shows that employee attributes like showing up for work on time, working hard, staying focused and working for ‘long hours’ merely brings out not more than 50 to 55% of an employee’s potential.

Hamel further argues that if a company needs to reap the full potential of an employee, a ‘shared vision’ with a coherent ‘employee engagement’ is the answer, to move this well beyond the 55%; a seamless employee engagement results in them having a never-ending quest to explore their deliverables in fundamentally new and improved ways, take ownership of their deliverables and go beyond the definition of their job with a philosophy that the job is not only intellectually meaningful but also spiritually purposeful!

Employee engagement

Given all this, it’s not long working hours, but it is the ‘employee engagement’ that is a crucial driver for maximizing creativity, efficiency and productivity; how can firms improve employee engagement?

For seamless employee engagement, ‘incentivization’ would be crucial, and the ‘type’ of incentives would differ between the category of the employee, within the organization. As Maslow, way back in the 1940’s, described that for certain categories of employees, satisfying the ‘lower-order’ needs like physiological requirements, safety for self and family and facilitating a sense of belonging and acceptance among social groups would be important, while for the others, the organization needs to the satisfy the ‘higher-order needs’ like job fulfillment, sense of accomplishment, respect, achieving competence and offering learning opportunities.

Incentivisation strategy

Along with an ‘appropriate’ incentivization strategy, the ‘organizational culture’ built by the leadership, gains prominence in the context of employee engagement.

As the late Sumatra Ghosh, the INSEAD professor puts it, organization generally complain that their employees are lazy, have lower productivity and don’t take ownership for their deliverables. He has a strong view that this has got nothing to do with the employee; he attributes this to the poor culture that these organizations have created for the employees to work, in the first place.

Companies over stressing on control, compliance, creating constraints, and a contractual engagement stifle employee’s that eventually shows up in poor productivity, lack of creativity and substandard output. Contrarily, it’s up to the management to create a culture of stretch, trust, support and creating an environment with ‘safety-net’ that will motivate them, make them take ownership, go beyond their call of duty and feel delighted to contribute.

Shared vision

By clearly building such an agenda, setting a ‘shared vision’ and seamlessly communicating the same with no ambiguity, sets the tone for the employees to work around, take ownership and align their personal agenda with that of the organizational agenda. On top of this, when the leadership builds a system that creates a healthy aspiration in the minds of the employee to stretch themselves and achieve something they would be proud of, and provide support for them to do so, eventually builds a strong bond between the employee and the organization, deepening the trust.

As Murthy said, a couple of decades ago, “Our assets walk out of the door each evening. We have to make sure that they come back the next morning”; this statement is much more relevant today, than it was in the early 2000’s.

How the leadership is able to build a culture that will delight the employees and excite them with the very thought of turning-up to work as they wake up in the morning, is the key to higher levels of creativity, efficiency and productivity. In essence, more than increased ‘regulated work hours’, it’s about seamless ‘employee engagement’, ‘appropriate incentivization’ and a conducive ‘culture’. Building a capable team, aligning them around the customer agenda, trusting them, and letting them loose; the magic then happens!

The writer is Distinguished Professor Adjunct (Strategy and Accounting), Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai

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