Working Late Hours

Some normal office conversations, which happen every evening:
Oh a long day today!
What’s new in it?

Working late?
Ya, as always.

But what is meant by late? Is it 8’O Clock in the evening or 11 in the night?

Everyone has, his or her own parameters. Some are lucky enough to get away with 9 to 5 kind of work timings whereas for others 9 to 5 is a dream, which is only on records.

It has become a culture in the corporate world to work late. I exclude BPOs and Call centre from my mention, as those guys are the luckiest to work only 8 hours and still get a home drop and pick up. Government Organisations are also strictly excluded, as “working late hours” is a term stranger to them.

But the question is, is there a need to work late?
The common word is - The workload is not enough to be managed in a day’s time.

How genuine it is? I can classify excessive workload into 2 categories:

I. Excessive workload due to circumstances beyond your control.
II. Excessive workload due to circumstances within your control.

I incline to ignore those exceptional days where workload is excessive due to statutory deadlines or such similar causes beyond the control of the organisation, but for which, there was awareness from the beginning.

I. Circumstances beyond your control for working late:
1. Due to work miss-management from the superiors and the big-bosses.
2. Due to improper or vague instructions given to you, on how to execute the work.
3. No proper systems in place.
4. Due to “new born” deadline today morning, which was non-existent till yesterday. (At least you didn’t even had a clue about it)
5. Taking care of someone else’s work, who would have gone on CL, SL or PL (or anywhere but not working).
6. No sufficient staffing to cater the workload.
7. Just because your boss is working late and he doesn’t like you leaving before him.
8. Rectification of superior’s previous wrong delegation or wrong direction.
9. Too many people to report to.
10. The persons monitoring you or your superiors have no work but to put pressure on you.
11. No appropriate training before commencement of work.

Criterions fitting the second category are:
II. Circumstances within your control.
1. Your inefficiency to perform the work in time.
2. Excessive wastage of time during lunch hours, more occasional tea breaks, chatting while working, excessive surfing of Internet in office and long personal chats on official phone.
3. Clearing the backlog created by your CL, SL or PL (by whatever name you call).
4. Lack of motivation to perform the duty.
5. No proper planning on how to begin and conclude the work.
6. Rectification of your own wrongly done work.
7. Not following standard process or technique to perform work, if there exists any.
8. Unnecessary gossiping during the work hours.
9. Not working during proper work hours and purposely sitting late to show off.

These are some reasons, which I could pen down. If you can list more reasons then please mention them in the comments.

Before that, where do you fall most of the time?

I’m also one of the unlucky ones who sit late in the office and work.
If I analyse the reasons for it, on an average I can say, 60% of the times Category 1, 15% of the times Category 2, and 20% of the times due to statutory or such similar deadlines.
Balance 5% of the times I go on time ;-)

I would be happy if you will mention your percentage too.

If you are in office then get back to work or your percentage in Category 2 will increase.