Blasé Capital IT: in or out

Over the past few years, there is an understated trend in the hub of India’s IT and software world, Bengaluru. In 2025, hundreds of tech employees were on the streets with placards that read, “We are not your slaves.” While the protests were ostensibly about working hours, and workers’ rights, some researchers see a connection with the growing and unending towards work-from-home (WFH) culture. A recent research study by a professor in University of Bath, Vivek Soundararajan, and others found that they had to do with “workplace inequality, which had simply relocated from the office into the home.” While it is true that many firms still rely largely on WFM, the costs that they save on space, utilities, and equipment do not vanish. “They are (were) transferred to workers and their families,” stated the study. WFH has relocated the workplace differences to the homes.

Consider space. In offices, the distinction is between the size of the cubicles, or whether some people have access to privacy via enclosed ones. In WFH scenarios, it is about those who live in smaller homes, bachelors who share houses, and people who live with extended families. Space becomes as much of a constraint, as it is in offices, although the dynamics are different. During the study, the researchers interviewed 51 employees who shared the homes with children, parents, grand-parents, and in-laws, apart from spouses. They are squeezed in small apartments that “double up as offices.” Finding quiet corners is difficult. It is tougher to occupy them for 10-12 hours at a stretch. Children pop in, maybe inadvertently, elders worry about lunches, dinners, snacks, and coffees. Office video calls require “careful choreography in a crowded household… where babies might be crying next to elderly relatives (family members) with medical complaints.”

Anecdotal evidence from the other sectors indicate that office calls are calibrated and timed while the children are at schools (between 9 am and 2 pm), when the elders are asleep (12 pm to 2 pm; 4 pm-6 pm), or when the working spouses are in offices, and non-working ones busy with their OTT entertainment shows. More problems arise when both the spouses have WFH responsibilities. Finding individual and respective private spaces, sometimes at the same time when the office calls clash, becomes overbearing. In most apartments, the walls are not soundproof, and the conversations get entangled. Children make noises, as they are prone too despite regular reminders. “For the workers we spoke to who had care responsibilities for various family members, the juggling required was extraordinary. We were told of the profound knock-on effects for family life, with chaotic mealtimes and evenings hijacked by (office) calls,” stated the study.

Power, Internet, device accessories, and working tables pose other issues. Since power cuts are common across cities, WFH employees invest in decent backup systems. Even if there are no power cuts, one cannot take the risk of a failure during calls with foreign clients, and senior managers. “During home visits, we saw battery units occupying valuable domestic space on balconies, in hallways and porches, equipment these homes were never designed to hold,” stated the study. Power backups are expensive, and need regular care and maintenance, which adds to the daily chores. In some cases, the one-time costs can equal the average monthly pay of a junior IT employee. Internet bandwidth is rationed. OTT viewing by children, elders, and non-working spouses is scheduled based on WFH needs, and around office calls. Audio-only calls become the default mode, and video is reserved for urgent needs. There is chaos related to unscheduled urgent calls.

Office surveillance has crept into the homes. Most IT, and other offices are known to monitor Internet use, emails sent and received, at least on official IDs, and hours spent glued to the monitors. Coffee and cigarette breaks, lunch times, and gossip periods are recorded, or observed, if unofficially, by the team leaders and administrators. This has become a part of WFH culture. As the study noted, “One 33-year-old male worker said his employer’s online system would ‘calculate how many hours you work, and which other websites you visit.’ He added that lapses would ‘automatically trigger a (message to my) manager,’ The surveillance extended into absurd territory. When power cuts struck… some workers were expected to prove it. A 28-year-old male engineer told us: ‘The boss said go out and take photos of your house and send it. He needed proof.’” Bosses and HR managers are obsessed with such details, as they feel that these are sometimes used as excuses to relax.

Clearly, a software developed in Bengaluru, or any other Indian city, faces different WFH problems and challenges compared to someone in London, Boston, or Singapore. “If remote work is to deliver on its promise, organisations and policy-makers must recognise that ‘working from home’ means fundamentally different things depending on where that home is, and who bears the hidden costs of making it work,” concluded the study. The ball is in the courts of the employers, not employees. The former were earlier forced to adopt WFH culture, and later accepted it because of costs and administrative realities. Employees adjusted, and cheated too by working less. But if WFH is a permanent or semi-permanent trend, new norms are required.