India’s faltering work culture

India is in a hurry. We want to become a $5 trillion economy, then a $10 trillion economy. We want to become a global manufacturing hub, a technology powerhouse and one of the world’s most competitive economies. We speak constantly about infrastructure, capital, innovation, artificial intelligence and skilling.

Yet there is one subject we rarely discuss with the seriousness it deserves: the way we work. We have millions of people going to work every morning. Offices are full, factories are running, meetings are happening and targets are being discussed. But being busy is not the same as being productive. Occupying a chair for eight or nine hours does not automatically create eight or nine hours of economic value.

This is where India’s work culture deserves an uncomfortable examination. The problem is not entirely with employees. It is not entirely with employers either. Both have contributed to a culture where activity is often mistaken for achievement, attendance for commitment and authority for leadership. The economic cost of this is enormous.

Gallup’s latest workplace data estimates that India’s disengagement costs the country approximately $351 billion, or ₹32.7 trillion, in lost workplace productivity every year, equivalent to about 9% of GDP. Only 23% of Indian employees were classified as engaged in 2025, while 59% were not engaged and 18% actively disengaged. These are not merely HR numbers. They are economic numbers.

Employees must look in the mirror

Let us begin with the employee because every conversation about workplace culture eventually becomes one-sided. We have become comfortable blaming the organisation, the boss, the salary, the workload and the system. Sometimes those criticisms are justified. But sometimes they are excuses.

There is a growing acceptance of minimum-effort employment in many workplaces. Do what is necessary. Avoid responsibility. Escalate difficult decisions. Protect yourself. Attend meetings. Send emails. Wait for instructions. Finish the day.

The phrase “not my job” has become more than an expression. In some workplaces, it has become a philosophy.

There are employees who are perpetually late but expect punctuality from everyone else. There are those who demand career growth without investing in their own competence. Some resist technology because it threatens familiar ways of working. Others confuse seniority with entitlement. And then there is the phenomenon of being busy without being useful.

A person can spend an entire day answering emails, attending meetings and moving between conversations and still accomplish very little. We have to rediscover a simple principle: employment is not merely an exchange of time for money. It is an exchange of capability and contribution for compensation and opportunity. The employee owes the organisation competence, responsibility, learning and results.

That does not mean employees must surrender their lives to their employers. Nor does productivity mean working longer hours. It means making the hours spent at work count.

Employers can’t escape the mirror either

Having said that, employers need to look equally hard at themselves. It is remarkably easy for an organisation to blame employees for poor productivity while ignoring the conditions under which those employees are expected to perform.

A poorly designed process can waste more time than a lazy employee ever could. A weak manager can demoralise an entire team. An unnecessary approval can delay an important decision for days. A badly conducted meeting can consume the productive time of twenty people. A confused reporting structure can make five people responsible for something that ultimately belongs to nobody.

And then there is micromanagement. Some managers still believe that leadership means knowing where everyone is, what everyone is doing and whether every email has been sent. That is not leadership. That is surveillance.

A good manager should not have to constantly ask, “What are you doing?” The better question is, “What outcome are you responsible for?”. This distinction matters.

Gallup polls latest findings are revealing. Only 30% of Indian managers were engaged in 2025, down sharply from 39% in 2024. Engagement among individual contributors also fell from 24% to 19%. Gallup identifies managers as a critical link between organisational priorities and the daily experience of employees.

This tells us something important. We cannot build a productive workforce with unproductive management.

If managers are overloaded, poorly trained, insecure about their own positions or promoted because of seniority or mere technical competence rather than management and leadership ability, the consequences eventually travel down the organisation.

The Invisible Bill we keep paying

The real cost of India’s work culture does not appear neatly in an annual report. There is no single accounting line called “hours lost because nobody made a decision.” There is no balance-sheet entry for the cost of a bad meeting.

Nobody calculates the annual cost of rework caused by poor communication, duplicated effort, unnecessary approvals, office politics, avoidable conflict, inadequate training or employees working far below their potential. Yet these costs are real.

Consider an organisation where a hundred employees lose just thirty minutes a day because of inefficient processes, unnecessary meetings or waiting for decisions. The organisation has already lost thousands of productive hours every year. Now multiply that across thousands of companies. Then across millions of employees. This is where India’s productivity conversation needs to become more serious.

The ₹32.7 trillion estimated cost of disengagement is not a measurement of every form of workplace inefficiency. It is one measurable dimension of the problem. The larger economic leakage from poor processes, managerial weakness, rework, under-utilisation and wasted human capability is much harder to quantify precisely. But difficult to measure does not mean insignificant. India’s workplace inefficiency is a hidden tax on economic growth.

AI & The emergence of new work culture

There is another reason why this conversation has become urgent. Technology is changing the meaning of productivity.

Artificial intelligence is no longer some distant possibility. It is already entering Indian workplaces at remarkable speed. EY’s 2025 Work Reimagined Survey found that 88% of Indian employees surveyed were using generative AI at work, with 37% using it daily.

EY’s separate India productivity study estimates that 24% of tasks across industries could potentially be fully automated, while another 42% could have the time spent on them significantly reduced through GenAI. This should force us to ask a difficult question. If technology can make us dramatically more productive, what happens to a work culture that is already struggling to use human capability efficiently?

AI will not merely replace certain tasks. It will expose inefficient ways of working. An employee who spends hours preparing a report that AI can produce in minutes will have to redefine his contribution. A manager who spends most of the day collecting information rather than making decisions will have to rethink his role. An organisation with ten layers of approval will eventually discover that technology has made the layers obsolete.

The future workplace will reward judgement, ownership, creativity, learning and accountability. It will have less patience for those who are always busy without producing anything of value.

Time for a new Indian work ethic

I do not believe the answer is to tell Indians to work harder. Indians already work hard. The need of the hour is to work better.

Employees need to understand that professional freedom comes with professional responsibility. If we want autonomy, we must demonstrate accountability. If we want higher salaries, we must continuously increase our value. If technology changes our jobs, we must learn to adapt rather than resist.

Employers have an equally important responsibility. They must stop measuring commitment merely through hours spent in the office. They must build clear lines of accountability. They must simplify processes. They must train managers to lead rather than simply supervise. They must reward performance rather than proximity to power. They must create workplaces where competent employees need not to be political to get recognized.

Not every productivity problem is caused by a lazy employee. Not every performance problem is caused by a bad boss. Mature organisations and ace professionals investigate before they accuse either.

This is ultimately a question of culture. A healthy workplace should have a simple social contract: the employee gives the organisation competence, commitment and results; the organisation gives the employee fair compensation, resources, respect, development and the opportunity to perform.

When either side breaks that contract, productivity suffers. India’s economic ambitions are too large for us to ignore this any longer.

The biggest productivity opportunity before India may not be sitting in a new factory, a new office or even a new AI system. It may simply be hidden in the way we work every day.

(Author is a senior BJP leader, Chairman of Nation Building Foundation & a Harvard Business School certified Org.Strategist.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K Krishna Sagar Rao

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