............

Mumbai

FIFA

cricket

By Chandni Doulatramani‘Will work for beer’ culture is thriving in Indian start-ups, but all is not hunky-doryDebanti Roy’s Friday nights are set. After work, she hangs out with her team at Spoyl, a pub in Bengaluru’s HSR Layout, an emerging neighbourhood for Indian start-ups. Roy works as the head of content at the e-commerce website that sells products curated by influencers. She joined the company in July 2018.“We talk mostly about work because they are all colleagues,” she says. “What else can you talk about?”These sessions, Roy says, are productive because they brainstorm and discuss upcoming campaigns, and “especially because alcohol gives you better ideas and we get excited about the scope of things that can be done”. The CMO and CEO, who are also part of these offline socialising sessions, take care of the bill.Not just that, once a month, if the company crosses a certain order, the HR orders beer and pizza for everyone at the office. “We can sit and drink at our desk,” says Roy, who loves her job. After all, what’s not to love?Taking cue from work cultures at American companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, Indian start-ups have started to lure young professionals, in particular, to work for them by offering them a rather laidback office lifestyle.This work culture in Indian start-ups has, up until now, largely been defined by foosball tables, gaming rooms, movie nights, open plan office layouts, flexible work hours, and no strict dress codes. Today, along with it, free beer is the latest addition to the list of enticements that start-ups employ to attract young talent.Anant Sharma, co-founder of Momo Media, a video content company that he started in 2015 in Bengaluru, says that “working late or on weekends begets a can of beer or two [for employees].” They also play basketball and watch TV shows together. “It [beer] is unnecessarily demonised in the usual work culture, and when you’re in a creative field, you want to be able to let your mind and body relax, for the good ideas to flow,” he says. “Of course, we don’t entertain getting drunk, but we make it a point to let our team members operate in the way they feel creative while being professional.”Employees work as late as 2am about five to six days a month on an average – and until 8am once every quarter. Sundays and two Saturdays in a month are officially off, but employees work two to three weekends every two months. If there’s a project that needs to be delivered, “you work till you finish, regardless of day or hour,” says Sharma.He goes to work on weekends even if he doesn’t have work, sometimes to support someone who does and sometimes just to “unwind”.“Flexi work hours” in new-age start-ups give employees the option to work at their own discretion as long as the job gets done. To offset the burden of work, they are offered multiple benefits at their disposal. In fact, a few Indian start-ups have sold a never-boring-always-fun work culture to millennials and Gen Zs in such a way that people look forward to spending more time at work.At JioSaavn, a music-streaming service office in, employees, especially bachelors, go home and come back to the office to play. Some just stay back after work until midnight to play the game. A “gaming room” in the office is also equipped with a foosball table and a carrom board.An office scooty is at the disposal of employees. “If you feel like you want to drink a beer in the middle of the day, you can have one. As long as your work is getting done, and nothing is getting affected, it’s all good,” says someone who was part of the company and did not want to be identified. “When HR is organising a party, you can drink anywhere, including at your desk.”In fact, JioSaavn’s HR even assigned the interns a task, which was to organise an office party with drinking games. They had a beer chugging competition, where HR sponsored all the alcohol.“At JioSaavn, we have always believed that work and play intersect, making way for some of our best output and ideas. We value both culture and company performance. This ethos has worked for some of the biggest companies in the world. In 2019, we were voted the “Most innovative company in India by Fast Company”, a spokesperson told Mirror in an email.Four years ago, when Tara (name changed), worked at a fashion e-commerce start-up in Bangalore’s Koramangala, they were given free pizza and pints of beer at their desks every month on a Friday, at around 6.30pm, that came with “interactive sessions”, where the four founders discussed work.“An open door policy and long tables with no segregations ensured that everyone, irrespective of office hierarchy, was encouraged to talk to each other without restrictions,” she says. “Often there were office parties that went on till post 10 pm and were held on the rooftop of the office building. One could drink as much as one pleased. And colleagues often became more than just friends.”Three months ago, the company shut down.Drinking at your desk may have been a taboo in the past, but today beer is what ends up drawing young professionals to the workplace.Pallavi Pundir, a journalist with VICE Asia, sits out of WeWork’s office in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai. She says everybody who works out of the co-working space gets a free Indian craft beer every day, from 4pm to 8pm, sponsored by WeWork. Members, though, are allowed to drink only in the designated community area. Finishing your work and going about your life is becoming rarer. People’s attention spans are shrinking. Boredom isn’t acceptable at the workplace anymore. Roy says Spoyl even has company-sponsored activities including football andafter office hours, but she doesn’t join her colleagues in those. “After work I want to go home. But if there’s a beer session, I’ll stay back,” she says. An interview request with Spoyl’s CEO Bhargav Errangi, despite several attempts, was ignored.This inherent merging of two lives, however, has been known to cause problems for the start-ups as well as the employees. This overlap is the primary cause of employee burnout and disruption of personal life, according to a survey titled ‘Culture Studies’, commissioned by the Workforce Institute at Kronos.Attrition rates in start-ups are soaring, currently from 50 per cent to 80 per cent. Entry-level employees end up not lasting for more than a couple of years at a start-up. “Workplace depression” is a thing and one out of every five employees in India Inc suffers from the condition, a survey by HR tech start-up Hush noted earlier this year.Ironically, offering attractive benefits that are being used to counter exhaustion and burnout, especially “flexi work hours” end up ensuring working longer hours. This, in turn, affects any desire for work-life balance and eventually contributes to a burnout.Twenty-six-year-old Niveaditta John, who worked with fashion e-commerce app Wooplr as a fashion curator between 2015 and 2016 in Bengaluru, says, “Initially, the beer at the workplace was fun because it was new, then it was just whatever. It stopped mattering to me and I didn’t really care for it.”She felt that offering beer was just another way of ensuring that employees worked overtime and were constantly plugged in. “We overlooked the fact that we weren’t getting paid for any of those extra hours we put in,” she says.John left the company after working for a year-and-a-half and says that she was overworked and underpaid for her efforts, apart from the work environment that kept getting “weird and awkward because of the politics and love affairs, which was too much drama to handle for a workplace”.