The thrill of joining a new company is always high and Ram was no exceptions but the new company was no less than a cultural shock for him. With every passing day, he was finding difficult to adjust to the new working environment. He finally decided to call it a day and submitted his resignation to his manager.

What exactly happened with him? Why did an exceedingly good performer decide to move out of the organisation?

Ram was a regular guy who came to his office on time, finish his work & leave on time to spend quality time with his family & friends in the pursuit of having healthy work life balance but his new company had a late working culture where people prefer to work late in the night.

I always wondered what’s wrong in working late in the corporate world. After all everyone is working hard to achieve the company goals & objective.

There is a debate going on various social sites on late working culture. I too decide to look into it. After analysing a lot, I was surprised with the outcome. I now strongly believe that working late is not a good practice. Contrary to the popular assumption, the culture of working late hurts the employee as well as the companies. There could be many pointers for discussion but I think below few are of outmost importance

• Health – Due to late sitting, eating habits of an individual changes a lot & leads to a lot of lifestyle diseases. This eventuality leads to increase of medical bills for the employee & frequent loss of work for the company as individual had to spend time in the hospital & need rest for recovery.
• Family – Companies may not have directly linked to the family of an employee but any challenge in the personal life of the individual directly affects his performance in the organisation. Because of being late to the home, he/she never able to spent good time with the family & start getting disconnected with them in medium to long term. In Ram’s case, the situation has become so worse that his marriage was slowly heading towards separation. For both the working couple, it’s a matter of frustration as most of the time they get to meet each other only on weekends. Sociologist will vouch for it that it leads to mental fatigue & at time depression of the particular individual.
• Silos – What late working does that it create silos or group in the organisation. People who sit late in the organisation often speak to only those who all are sitting late with them in the company. It leads to groupism on the key issues which no organisation would want to happen in the company.
• Loss of productivity – This is absolutely shocking. Contrary to the popular belief, late sitting actually reduces the productivity of the employee. Because he has to leave late in the day, more often he keep postponing the work to the later part of the day which leads to loss of productive work hours. Importantly since you are working late, at times you need to wait for tomorrow because you may be needing help of someone who has already left the office. The reason that organization maintains time zone is to ensure that all individual required for the job should be available. But few work late & expect others to respond to them around that time. Imagine you got call at 10:30 pm in the night when you are having dinner with the family for a regular office work.
• Feeling of resentment- While loss of productivity is definitely a concern for an organisation, resentment among employees is even a bigger worry. To an extent late working culture contributes to it. Let us imagine an employee coming on time & had to wait for another for 3 hrs to get his input from other for completing the task. It leads to the feeling of resentment & disrespect among the two individuals. It is very dangerous for any organization & as it leads to infighting, subsequently hinder the work.
• High Administration Cost—it’s very important for the companies to understand that late working leads to extra operational cost without any impact or improvement in the performance of employee or the company. Whether an employee comes at 9 in the morning or 2 pm in the afternoon? Whether an employee comes at 2 pm in the afternoon & leave at 12 am in the midnight? Companies will have to burn the cash to maintain operations from 9 am to 12 am in midnight to provide support to the employees.  Imagine what it leads to, 50% increase in cost of AC, lights, admin staff etc per day. For a year it becomes a very substantial amount. In the age of cutting throat competition, every penny matters & 30% to 50% increase of operational cost is huge. If bowling a no ball in cricket can be termed as crime, I believe shelling out so much extra money in this manner is definitely a crime.
• Losing out employees- As it happened in the case of Ram, there are employees who move out of the organisation leading companies to wonder what went wrong in their hiring or support to the employee.

In the age of competition it’s important for every organisation to get best out of their employees, cut each & every unnecessary expenses. Probably enforcing common working hours will have answer to many such question, companies are facing these days. More than 90 % of the companies have common working timings but not followed religiously at many places. One need to understand that by working late, you are doing more harm to you & your company….