Toxic Work Culture at Infosys: A Fallout of Narayana Murthy’s 70-Hour Week Suggestion

The suggestion recently floated by Infosys founder Narayana Murthy for the young Indians to work 70 hours a week to boost productivity and thereby take home good salaries has touched off a nation-wide debate.

His statement says something many of his detractors have: there seems to be a deep-rooted toxic work culture at Infosys or elsewhere, only that people keep writing longer hours without matching it with better remuneration and work-life balance .

Murthy’s Call for Hard Work

Murthy in an interview with Infosys’ former CFO Mohandas Pai said that young Indians need to sacrifice long hours, like the post-war Japan and Germany. 

Such dedication is the reason for India’s survival amid the global economies, he said. As a counter, Murthy pointed out that in the beginning days of Infosys, he had a 85-90 hour work week itself.

Compensation of Employees and Stagnation

Infosys sits atop the leaderboard of IT companies worldwide, but when it comes to employee satisfaction, there’s much more to this story. 

Many have felt a stagnation of their salaries. Freshers arrive with a starting package of ₹3.6 lakh, which has barely changed over the last decade. 

Mid-level employees who have already long years of service behind them often find that their compensation lags behind market value compared to that of their peers in other companies​

Infosys’s average salary for a software engineer ranges from ₹3.5 lakh to ₹6 lakh a year, woefully behind peers like TCS or Accenture. 

Bonus and increments are on completely the other end of the chart. Expected annual increment is just enough to beat inflation. All these combine well with the compulsion of working for long hours when the project is in crunch time.​​

Voices from Inside: Employee Experiences

According to several Infosys employees who wished to go unnamed, the company culture tends to be much more employee-willing to work longer hours beyond their official working hours. 

“The expectation to stay available beyond working hours is unwritten but understood. It’s impossible to manage a life outside work,” said a software engineer.

Another shared how often he was summoned to the office and rebuked for not attending weekend meetings. “When you work six days a week, as Murthy did in Infosys’ early years, it takes a toll. There’s no respite, and the compensation does not make up for the sacrifices,” the employee said.

Reactions to Murthy’s Statement

Murthy’s claim has garnered much mixed reaction. Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal believes that it is time for India to “build in one generation what others built in many.” 

However, the measures revealed some famous voices over its measure, especially coming from Ashneer Grover, former co-founder of BharatPe, who spoke about outcomes rather than hours. Outcomes should be measured instead of hours logged. 

Others felt that too many work hours may backfire and result in burnout and decreased productivity​

The Broader Implication

Murthy’s remarks cast a spotlight over IT sector of India and its ostensibly ignored personnel issues. 

Despite being considered the flagship of India’s technology industry, this report demonstrates how the company, like most others, must change what it does to retain the people who can take India into the future.

But with Murthy’s comments, it has become a wake-up call for Infosys and other Indian IT firms to reassess their work culture and compensation structures. A workplace needs just as much thought as goes into the hard work required to be a global competitor.

Infosys once stood as the symbol of technological rise in the country, but will it change now, or will it be mired in the same old outdated ways?.