Indian employees are helping companies work across continents. The revenue travels smoothly across time zones. The human cost does not.
Bikas Pandey I Senior Journalist and Ethical Strategist; Founder–Editor, KYB India
It is 8:30 in the evening in Bengaluru. Dinner is on the table, but one chair is still empty. A call with the European team ran late. Before it ends, a message arrives from New York asking for a “quick update.”
The employee eventually joins the family, phone beside the plate and laptop still within reach. Nobody has officially extended the shift. There may be no overtime entry or instruction to remain on duty. Yet the working day has not really ended. The overwork culture in India is no longer shaped by local offices alone. It is increasingly connected to multinational teams, different time zones and the unspoken expectation that employees should remain available.
This has become familiar to professionals employed by companies operating across Asia, Europe and North America. Morning begins with one region, afternoon belongs to another, and the United States comes online just as India prepares to log off. Global collaboration has created opportunities, careers and enormous commercial value. It has also created a class of employees who are never fully at work and never completely away from it.
Microsoft gave this condition a useful name in its 2025 Work Trend Index: the “infinite workday.” Its research found that 30 per cent of meetings now cross multiple time zones. Meetings beginning after 8 p.m. had increased by 16 per cent in a year, while chats outside standard working hours were up 15 per cent.
“The modern workday for many has no clear start or finish.”
— Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2025
That sentence will feel uncomfortably accurate in many Indian homes.
What the Calendar Does Not Show
The effects usually begin with small adjustments. Dinner can wait. Exercise can be skipped today. A call during a child’s homework will take only ten minutes. The presentation can be checked once before bed.
Repeated often enough, these adjustments begin to shape the body. Sleep becomes lighter because the mind is still carrying a conversation from work. The employee wakes without feeling restored, relies on caffeine to start the day and postpones exercise because there is neither time nor energy. Headaches, digestive trouble and pain from long hours at a desk are easy to dismiss individually. Together, they are signs that recovery has been pushed out of the schedule.
The mental disturbance is harder to see. A person may stop working at nine but continue thinking about work until midnight. The possibility of another message keeps part of the mind alert. Even silence no longer feels like time off; it feels like a gap before the next demand.
The World Health Organization lists excessive workloads, long or inflexible hours, low control, job insecurity and conflicting home and work demands among the risks to mental health at work. It also reminds employers of something that often disappears from discussions about targets:
“Decent work is good for mental health.”
— World Health Organization
Work can provide income, confidence, purpose and social connection. Poorly designed work can begin to take those same things away.
The damage eventually reaches deeper than tiredness. Employees lose the unoccupied time in which they might read, meet friends, pursue an interest or simply think about their own lives. Weekends become recovery periods rather than lived experiences. A person can remain successful on paper while feeling strangely absent from the life that success was supposed to improve.
This is where the disturbance reaches the Being. The employee is performing a role efficiently but has less space to exist outside it.
The Bill Is Quietly Sent Home
Families rarely appear in productivity reports, although they absorb much of the cost.
A partner learns that evening plans cannot be confirmed until the last meeting ends. A child is told to wait because a senior colleague has called. Public holidays remain provisional. Even during dinner, everyone knows that the phone placed beside the plate has the power to interrupt the room.
No single incident destroys a relationship. The strain develops through repetition. Family members receive attention in the gaps left by work, and the employee carries guilt in both directions—guilt while ignoring the office and guilt while ignoring the family.
Social life shrinks in much the same way. Invitations are declined because the week has been exhausting. Friends stop expecting a quick response. The employee may have enough income to participate in life but not enough energy or control over time to do it.
Why not simply switch off the phone?
For many employees, that advice is detached from financial reality. There may be a home loan, school fees, elderly parents, medical expenses or the memory of recent layoffs. The person calling after hours may also influence ratings, assignments and promotions. A request that appears polite on screen carries the weight of that power.
A 2024 Censuswide survey for Indeed found that 79 per cent of the Indian employees surveyed feared consequences—including missed promotions, reputational damage or project setbacks—if they ignored work communication after hours. The survey is not recent enough to describe every workplace today, but the fear it identified remains central to understanding why individual boundary-setting is often inadequate.
The phone stays on because the salary matters.
The Revenue Never Sleeps
There is a commercial reason multinational work keeps expanding into personal time. Work moving between countries can reduce turnaround time, provide continuous customer service and keep projects active for most of the day. India’s skilled workforce and location between major global markets make it especially valuable to this model.
These advantages are legitimate. The ethical problem appears when a company builds a 24-hour business without paying for a properly designed 24-hour system.
A responsible operation can employ regional shifts, rotate inconvenient meetings, maintain adequate staffing and compensate people assigned to on-call duty. A cheaper arrangement is to let daytime work spill informally into the night. The employee continues to cooperate because each request seems small and refusal feels risky.
This labour often disappears from company accounts. The late call may not be recorded as overtime. The interrupted dinner has no invoice. Nobody calculates the value of a spouse cancelling a plan or a child waiting for the laptop to close.
The company has not eliminated the operating cost. It has sent part of the bill home.
The International Labour Organization’s 2026 global report places poorly managed work alongside long hours, job insecurity and high demands with low control. It estimates that health conditions connected with workplace psychosocial risks contribute to more than 840,000 deaths annually and economic losses equivalent to 1.37 per cent of global GDP. These are worldwide estimates, not India-specific figures, but they establish how serious the consequences of work design can become.
The arrangement does not remain profitable forever. Fatigue weakens judgement. Fragmented attention creates mistakes and rework. Some employees withdraw emotionally; others leave as soon as they can afford to. Companies then pay for absence, attrition, recruitment, lost experience and weaker productivity.
Gallup found that the proportion of engaged Indian employees fell from 30 per cent in 2024 to 23 per cent in 2025. It estimates that workforce disengagement—not overwork alone—costs India approximately $351 billion in lost productivity each year, close to 9 per cent of GDP.
“This figure should sound an alarm and make the country’s declining engagement a national economic crisis.”
— Gallup, Rebuilding Indian Workplaces for the Future
Calling exhausted employees uncommitted misses the possibility that their withdrawal may be a response to the organisation itself.
A Global Company Needs Fairer Time
Managers are also working under pressure. Many are handling smaller teams, demanding clients and targets set far above them. This explains some late calls, but it cannot become a permanent excuse. A poorly designed system should not be passed down the hierarchy until the least powerful employee and the employee’s family carry its full weight.
Companies working across continents need to answer a few direct questions. Does the same country repeatedly receive the earliest and latest meetings? Are employees expected to complete a full Indian workday before joining overseas calls? Is after-hours availability formally defined and compensated? Can someone decline a non-emergency call without worrying about the next performance review?
Rotating meeting times would distribute inconvenience instead of exporting it to one region. Better written handovers could replace many calls. Teams could identify a narrow period for cross-border collaboration and protect the rest. Genuine on-call roles should be limited, scheduled and paid.
Leadership behaviour matters more than a wellness statement. If senior executives praise people for replying at midnight, employees will understand what the organisation truly rewards. No workshop on balance can cancel that message.
India does not need to reduce its ambition or step back from the global economy. It needs employers capable of building international businesses without treating human availability as an unlimited resource.
The company may work around the clock. Its people cannot.
KYB Insight
When global efficiency depends on an employee remaining permanently reachable, the business is transferring part of its operating cost to the employee’s health and home.
The Business Verdict
A company cannot claim global efficiency while hiding part of its operating cost inside an employee’s personal life. If round-the-clock business requires after-hours labour, that labour must be planned, rotated and paid for. Otherwise, the company may be earning across time zones while quietly weakening the people responsible for that revenue.
Bikas Pandey, KYB India
#KYBIndia
Disclaimer: This article offers general editorial analysis of workplace culture and employee well-being. It is not medical, legal or employment advice.
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