Grief spread across the IT sector last week when a 50-year-old employee of an MNC jumped to his death from his sixth-floor office at New Town’s Candor TechSpace. The focus has once again turned to mental health, as Dwaipayan Bhattacharjee was battling depression. Many other employees spoke to The Telegraph Salt Lake about the stress, fatigue, and toxic work culture they endure at workplaces that make it difficult for them to enjoy what they do.

Overworked to death

The most common complaint seems to be overtime, that too without extra pay. “What more can one expect in a country where industry leaders recommend working 70 to 90 hours a week?” asks a man whose office is very close to Candor TechSpace. He puts in 10 hours a day, with a 45-minute break, five days a week.

What’s worse is that all their meetings and training sessions are conducted after hours, further eating into their free time. He complains of back, shoulder, and neck pain from sitting for prolonged hours, as well as frequent changes in eyesight power from staring at a screen the whole time.

“The other day, a colleague informed our team she was running a temperature, but she was still forced to work. Another colleague wasn’t granted leave even when a puja was being performed in her house,” says the man, who works in data analytics.

Such employees are all the more frustrated when their human resource (HR) departments organise mandatory team-building exercises. “After making us slog 12 hours a day, they have the nerve to invite us for rangoli-making workshops! And if we don’t participate, we are frowned upon. These companies treat us like slaves and want us to have no life beyond office. It’s exhausting,” he sighs.

If office policies are people-unfriendly in some places, in others, it is the colleagues or seniors who make matters worse. “My senior sends an email at 9pm on Fridays demanding a project submission by 9am on Monday. If we do not check our mails over the weekend, thinking it’s our off-time, we miss deadlines without even realising it. Not to mention, we have to sacrifice all our family time completing the work,” says a lady whose office is in Sector V. “We’ll burn out like this.”

Much depends on vibing with the boss too. Non-smokers complain that those who smoke get quality, relaxed time with a smoker boss where important decisions are made. Another boss, a religious one, wanted his junior to accompany him to Kumbh Mela.

“I had no intention of spending even more time with him, let alone walking into that crowd and paying a bomb for flight tickets. I had to refuse, but who knows how he took it,” says a man who lives in Ultadanga.

This same senior did not want an employee to resign but would not offer him a better package to stay either. “So he started personally monitoring every mistake he made and reported them to HR with explicit instructions to make his exit interview difficult,” he says.

When you can’t be yourself

A woman from Salt Lake’s Sector III said she is often bypassed for responsibilities because she has a child, and bosses assume she will not perform at her optimum level.

“This, despite me scoring higher than male colleagues in courses and receiving better feedback from clients. I have also stopped dressing stylishly, as I was being tagged a ‘dumb blonde’ and not taken seriously,” she says.

Many employees said they consciously hide their achievements outside work from colleagues. “I’m good at many arts, but if we share these, we become the object of envy. And the next time we make a slip at work, we have to hear taunts like: ‘How will she work when she sits singing all day?’ It’s demeaning, so I’ve just stopped sharing,” says an employee of a Sector V office.

A significant sufferer of this is the LGBT+ community. “Many men from this community do not enjoy sports, for instance. But if they don’t fit in with straight men, they will be ostracised. So, if there was a cricket match on Sunday night, they spend their commute time on the Metro on Monday morning reading sports headlines just to contribute something to office conversations. Similarly, they have to lie about their weekends if they were spent with same-sex partners,” says a gay man working at a market research MNC.

If LGBT+ employees are out of the closet, they are subjected to lewd jokes and comments and are deprived of recognition for their work. “All progress made in this department will slow down now as Donald Trump has eliminated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programmes, and many global organisations are toeing his line to appease him,” he says.

DEI is to organisational frameworks and policies aimed at fostering a fair and inclusive environment for people from all genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations etc.

Success at any cost

Priyanka Chatterjee, a corporate story consultant who uses storytelling to teach businesses about various challenges, is all too familiar with workplace toxicity. “The most common problem that emerges in workshops is of employees being overworked,” says the Ultadanga-based professional.

“In fact, it is Indians and Chinese who pollute global work culture. We come from highly populated lands where competition is fierce. Others abroad go home on time, but Indians — accustomed to fighting it out in Bongaon local trains – stay on. Naturally, the boss sees and depends on them more, and others are forced to stay back too,” she says.

The employee working in market research agrees. “Our population is so huge that if you quit, you will be replaced in no time. Add to that the looming threat of AI taking over jobs. This itself creates immense pressure, and we have to over-stretch just to survive. We may feel stressed, but given how little mental health is prioritised, end up venting to family members who don’t know how to help us,” he says.

Chatterjee adds that a new, unhealthy mindset of ‘success at all costs’ is taking over. “Such companies see employees as computers, furniture, or numbers, not as human beings. To change this, we need more leaders in top management who are trained in emotional intelligence. Why is it assumed that employees will, by default, stay at work overtime? Why are they considered lazy if they ask for leave?”

She mentions a pharmaceutical company in Hyderabad that has introduced menstrual leave for women but says India is still far behind the West, where employees get bereavement leave even if a spouse’s relative passes away. “Here, to show they care, offices install gyms on the premises, but if anyone uses them, it is held against them. If these employees ever slip at work, they are taunted with comments like, ‘You spend all your time in the gym,’” Chatterjee shares.

Employees, she feels, need to develop the concept of boundaries. “Understand what your capacity, role, and responsibilities are and what constitutes overwork. Speak up if you are overtaxed before it builds up and erupts one day like a volcano,” she says, adding that there could also be apps or software that automatically shut down after an employee has worked a set number of hours, forcing them to take a break.