Work Daze

If you think your employer is demanding more in terms of effort, commitment, and THBC [Total Hours your Butt is in your Chair), get ready for a surprise. Not content with the 8-hour day, or the 12-hour day, management is turning its attention deficit disorderly conduct to a brand new paradigm – the 24-hour day.

Change is to be expected, of course, and even newbies to the workforce will have experienced workday creep. This is the industry term for the minimum hours expected by the creeps that manage us. In a few short decades it has transformed the 9-to-5 of the famous Dolly Parton song to the new age 9 to 9 demanded by today’s managers in the name of increased competition in a global business environment.

But now management has its bloodshot eye on stretching the workday even further. To do so, companies will take advantage of time zone technology that allows workers in different lands to work on the same project. In other words, to make the workday stretch around the clock, the work has to stretch around the globe.

Sound unrealistic? According to a recent article by Amar Gupta, a professor at the University of Arizona, in The New York Times, the idea of a 24-hour work force is entirely workable. Once limited only to call centers, Professor Gupta sees a round-the-clock round-the-world workforce scheme implemented in a wide variety of “knowledge factories.”

“Thanks to more robust information technology and a growing acceptance of offshoring,” Gupta writes, “ the concept is feasible for a much broader range of work.”

Unless the global business guru from Arizona is spending too much time in the sun, there is a definite possibility that your job will someday become chopped and channeled into three parts, part of which you will continue to do in your inimitable fashion, while the other two parts are farmed out to your counterparts in – say –Iceland and India.

That means when you finish perfecting your day’s work and head off to Kit Kat Lounge for some well-needed entertainment and barley-based rejuvenation, your project will be seamlessly transmitted to Olaf in Iceland who is just starting his day with a nice hot cup of Kúmenkaffi. You’ll be in your jammies and snoring happily when Olaf finishes his eight hours of tinkering with your work and leaves for home and the big pot of Makkarónumjólk his wife has waiting. Olaf is done for the day, but, in India, Indrajit is just getting started. After a hearty breakfast of Moong Dal Vada, Indrajit will add his eight hours to the project that will be waiting on the computer screen on your desk when you roll in with a coffee and a bear claw the next morning.

The fact that the project you see in the morning will be completely different than the project you left last night is not a problem. According to the proponents of the expanding workplace, it is progress. According to those of us who have difficultly working with people who speak the same language and eat the same burgers, you’ve got a whole world of trouble in your hands.

Professor Gupta is more optimistic. He posits that each worker on the team will be inspired and motivated by the work done by the previous worker in the previous country. I’m not so sure, but I guess it’s you’d be happy if only a third of your job is being outsourced.

Gupta sees the 24-hour day spreading to a wide variety of “more sophisticated and less structured work, endeavors in medicine, logistics, product design, finance, accounting and law.” So if your next traffic ticket calls for a fine of 500 Dinars, or your doctor prescribes a course of acupuncture and Chinese herbs, it would not be unreasonable to suspect that you have been globalized.

On the positive side, a diverse, international workforce could help companies create products and solutions with greater appeal to a global audience. And it would be nice to have someone who knows your job and your frustrations with whom you can complain – assuming you learn how to speak Hindi.

There is one fly in the ointment. The whole 24-hour kit and caboodle depends on the IT department, and those guys can’t even get your computer to talk to your printer. If you come in one morning and find out you have an additional 16 hours of work to do, you know who to blame.