That Feeling When by Nikhil Taneja: The rona dhona about work-life balance
No job is, and should be, the be-all and end-all for any employee—or even an employer. What are your thoughts?
Last week, a viral post by a CEO of an Indian start-up advised young Indians to spend 18 hours at their jobs for at least four to five years without doing any random ‘rona dhona’. The CEO advised 22-year-olds to ‘worship’ their work and to stop watching ‘random content’ that talks about ‘work life balance blah blah’, so that they can ‘build a flex’ in the first five years of their career that they carry with them for the rest of their lives.
This post, fittingly, got severe backlash on the internet, and even managed to become the fodder for discussion and debate on news TV channels. But for anyone who has been part of, or followed the Indian start up and MNC culture since its inception, this... isn’t news. What the CEO wrote in his LinkedIn post was just an articulation of what every Indian business owner has been conditioned to believe in, because that was what was expected of them too.
Statistically incorrect
It is tragic that even in 2022 we are still having a debate on work-life balance, even as Gen-Z workers are quitting workplaces en masse. In every second conversation I have with start-up founders (and even legacy company leadership), their biggest pain point is that young people won’t stick around long enough in their companies. And every single time, my answer has been a question: does your work culture try to enrich the lives of the young, or treat them as workhorses to perform round-the-clock tasks because of the toxic idea that, if you are young, why do you even need time outside of work?
Ever since the economic boom of the 1990s that made it possible for any young person from any part of India to ‘make it’ in the famed metros where start-ups and MNCs rise and fall every day, young talent has always been considered replaceable because of the sheer number of CVs floating around the inboxes of hiring managers on a daily basis, and hundreds more that are lying abandoned. And when you look at people as a statistic, as one among thousands in a workforce of millions, you will not bother to see them as human beings, with aspirations, dreams, hopes and feelings.
Two-way growth
At the same time, young people today look at jobs through the prism of fun Insta stories and fawning LinkedIn posts, where only the best parts of the work experiences are put up—the camaraderie, the water cooler moments, the parties, the life-changing learnings. So, when young people enter jobs, they believe in the best version of what their work lives could be, only to find the worst versions of what their work lives are: all work and no life.
It’s a massive gap in expectation versus reality that employers haven’t yet begun recognising (forget solving!), and are then left with little else to do than put up posts asking 22-year-olds to get with the programme, because anything other than non-stop work is literally being a cry baby.
No job is, and should be, the be all and end all for any employee, and it is not only important, but essential, that employers everywhere start treating young people with respect, decency and empathy. Only by encouraging the people on their teams to grow and flourish in their own lives will they be able to create cultures where employees give them the same love and respect back by helping grow their companies too.
Nikhil Taneja is a writer, producer, storyteller, public speaker, feeler of feelings, men’s mental health advocate and co-founder of Yuvaa
That Feeling When is a fortnightly column that offers a relatable take on mental health and emotional well-being.
From HT Brunch, September 10, 2022
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