One of the charms of Bahrain is its calm rhythm of life which allows us to be productive as well as enjoy our ‘party animal’ moments. Right now, with the weather in fine form, we are making the most of it all with entertainment, conferences and even the magnificent glitter of the Jewellery Arabia show on the cards. And, all this runs parallel to the hum of our everyday work routine – the 8 to 6 which puts the bread and butter on our table with a two-hour lunch break in between.
That lunch break is important – it helps us to pause and reset for the latter part of our workday so that productivity does not falter. Newcomers from busier or larger cities where such a mid-day reset is not always possible, tend to proclaim it a waste of time. Opinions (mostly unsolicited) are offered on how this midday break interrupts the rhythm of the workday at its peak and how we can wrap up sooner if we grab a shawarma at our desk. However, their minds change soon enough in the face of the noontime summer heat when everything else shuts down.
Before we congratulate ourselves on Bahrain’s eight-hour x five day (in most cases) work week pattern, we have to also face the fact that it gets mauled regularly, especially for those on the lower rungs. End-of-day report requests that mean unaccounted overtime, out-of-work-hours ‘emergencies’ which means you have to answer a flurry of office phone calls in the middle of a family get-together and holiday assignments that shred your weekend plans, are all part of the Bahrain work culture, especially for junior expats – yes, this is an uncomfortable truth and not always mentioned by the politically correct.
Often, companies, whether they are managed by Bahraini managers or expat, tend to treat their national employees with much more consideration that they would their expat workers. The feeling seems to be that expat juniors are there to pick up the slack because many are away from family and need not factor that aspect of their lives into the grid, unlike Bahrainis who have family gatherings and responsibilities to attend to. This results in considerable emotional burnout for the overburdened.
It is interesting against this ‘grassroots’ backdrop to scrutinise the comments of two of the world’s richest men on the topic of how many hours of work is ideal and what the future working life would look like. N R Narayanamurthy, founder of Indian tech giant Infosys, has long made headlines for sternly telling Indians to work a 72-hour week – that’s 12 hours every day for six working days a week. He is regularly trolled for promoting a galley slave mentality. This time round, he has linked it to patriotism and said India will only succeed if the nation follows China’s example and ramps up work hours.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has confidently predicted that work will be ‘optional’ for humans in a little over two decades and that money will be irrelevant, thanks to AI and robotics. That would mean a rise in leisure and adventure choices, which in turn, would boost careers in that field since these thrive on in-person connections.
Since the wealth of these two worthies makes their work-hours irrelevant to you and I, may I propose that we simply start our search for the ideal model, by curtailing off-duty assignments for ourselves and our juniors? Good management means learning to turn a profit or do a great job in the time allotted and not encroach on your team’s non-office lives.
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