Bad news for employees of this IT company as it brings mandatory 10-hour workdays in India; not Narayana Murthy’s Infosys, L&T, Ratan Tata’s TCS, name is…

Amid the heated debate over work-life balance, Genpact– a US-based IT, outsourcing, and consulting services firm– has introduced mandatory 10-workdays in some of its Indian offices such as Hyderabad, triggering backlash from employees, who have expressed their dissatisfaction with the decision, stating that the increased workhours have resulted in low-morale due to fatigue and more pressure.

According to details, Genpact is using an internal dashboard to track “active hours” of employees, sparking backlash for threatening the well-being of its workers, while not offering much in return. Many Genpact employees have taken to platform like Reddit and Fishbowl to voice their grievances, arguing that while longer are technically legal under Indian labor laws, they are not in sync with flexible work models that have become a norm globally, especially after the pandemic.

“The expectation of logging 10 active hours each day is not only unrealistic for many roles, but it also signals a complete disregard for personal time.The Rs 3,000 incentive hardly covers the cost of our additional mental and physical effort,” reads a Genpact employee’s Reddit post.

Genpact’s internal productivity monitoring system, which is used by managers to track time spent on tasks, has also come under fire, with employees alleging that the system flags even minor deviations as “behavioural issues”, which has created an atmosphere of fear and hyper-surveillance among the workers.

As per reports, workers who comply with the company’s new 10-hour workday rule are being offered a monthly incentive of Rs 3,000, which comes to roughly Rs 150/day, a paltry amount that employees have termed symbolic, and even insulting, rather than compensatory. “For an extra hour of work every day, we are being offered less than what some people spend on coffee,” wrote a Genpact worker on Fishbowl.

Meanwhile, Genpact has not issued an official statement about its new workhours policy or addressed the backlash arising from it.

News