By Our Reporter
SHILLONG: Lila Khongwir (name changed on request) is an executive with an insurance firm in the city. With almost twelve hours of duty, there is no question that the gap between office work and personal life is getting more indistinct. “Office hours are getting longer, there is no time for anything else,” she said.
Long office hours is a trend seen not only in big cities but in small corporate sectors, too. Executives, like Lila, find it increasingly difficult to strike a balance between their professional and personal life.
Terming the situation as a boiling point, an Assistant Manager of a private stock broking firm here said that most employers do not understand the situation since everyone, relatively, has to fulfill their personal needs besides their office.
“There can be an urgency / emergency in everyone’s life and it has been seen that schools particularly don’t want to understand the difference between a house-parent and a working parent,” said the manager, whose son is studying in a reputed school in the town.
An HR Manager of a private sector bank, who was on a tour to its bank branch in the city said that it is important to know the boundaries and make sure that one’s personal life is not steaming over into one’s work space.
However, it has been seen, from this interaction with a cross section of the corporate interface that employees managing client relationships or sales stands benefited since their work profile involves attending clients / customers in their workplace and doorsteps.
Agrees an executive of an IT solutions firm who said that even if a sales executive / manager is out on personal work, their absence is often taken as being away on work.
“Sales guys have the advantage of disappearing and fake client meetings to finish their chores,” she said.
“The more, an employee mixes personal work and office, the more he/she becomes preoccupied.
As a result, it becomes second nature of the employee and ultimately the truth spills out and then the actual work suffers,” said a manager of a hotel.
Such “office bunkers” work keeps piling and becomes unmanageable as there is no restraint or self discipline from the employees side. An employee who habitually focuses on personal work, will take more than time and effort to counteract that and by that time one may be condemned as a shirker, unreliable and more, says corporate experts. And so it is important to determine the types of personal work that infringes upon one’s office deliverable.