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Main News; Business Desk
COLUMN ONE; Working around the clock; When business expands globally,
U.S.-based workers' schedules do too. A call at 5 a.m. must be India
clocking out. Or is it Chile waking up?
19 June 2007
Los Angeles Times
Los Gatos, Calif.
IT'S Sunday dinner in the Khanna family's spotless three-bedroom condo,
and the matriarch, Ritu, is happy. She munches a spicy stew of
cauliflower, carrots and peas with her husband, Vivek, and their teenage
son, Kanishka. She and Vivek swap memories of growing up in Kolkata and
sip Chardonnay.
Daylight slips away. Then so does her husband.
"There it starts," she says.
Vivek sits up a little straighter. His BlackBerry begins to buzz more
frequently. He seems ready to spring from the table.
That's because his attention is shifting to another place and time --
Mumbai, India, nearly 9,000 miles away. There it's just before 9 a.m. on
Monday morning, 12 1/2 hours ahead of California, and he can imagine his
colleagues at the back-office outsourcing company he works for, filing
into the office, turning on their computers, chatting about their
weekends.
They will soon want to talk with Khanna, the firm's U.S. director of
business development, about processing payroll forms, healthcare claims
and accounting vouchers. They may have leads to help him drum up more
clients. The 40-year-old multitasker will take their calls and e-mail
from a desk in his garage, where he sits between a foosball table and
some bicycles, until 11 p.m. He will wake up to resume work before 5
a.m. so he can catch the end of the Indian workday.
"If you look at it," he says, "I'm never at work, and I'm never off
work."
Khanna is a new breed of globalized worker, testing the limits of
international commerce, his body and his family's patience. It's an
often overlooked side effect of sending jobs overseas: Work spread
across many time zones demands that managers and co-workers attune to
the world's business cycle while living out of sync with those around
them.
"It's the sun-never-sets model," says Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at
Basex Inc., a business research firm in New York. He calls people like
Khanna "time-zone shifters." His company estimates that about half of
the 46 million so-called knowledge workers in the U.S., a category that
covers anyone whose primary job is to work with information, are engaged
in some kind of time-zone shifting, extending the day beyond the normal
9 to 5.
More and more, their responsibilities span continents -- clients in
California, colleagues in India, software engineers in Romania or China.
"Bicoastal is so passe," Spira says.
Technology makes it all possible. Workers and managers can brainstorm,
strategize and review via e-mail, instant messaging, cheap
Internet-based phone calls and online videoconferencing.
Time-zone shifting means knowing that if you arranged your schedule to
accommodate business in India, then dealing with Shanghai isn't that
much harder. Just add an extra 2 1/2 hours to your day.
Tacking on Japan, however, can be brutal, especially for a
self-described "morning guy." It's only an hour later, Khanna says, but
"the peak comes before dinner and goes through midnight." He knows
people -- colleagues, friends, parents at his son's school -- who deal
daily with India and Europe plus clients in the U.S. It's a killer
combination, providing no predictable daily downtime.
"They have three eight-hour shifts," he says, laughing.
ONE can get lost trying to figure out who's where and what time it is
there. From his office in the Silicon Valley town of Saratoga, Alok
Aggarwal, chairman of Evalueserve, a research and analysis firm, once
miscalculated the time difference and missed a conference call with Tel
Aviv. He thought the 9 p.m. appointment was at 9 a.m.
"I felt terrible for a couple days," he says.
His life's "time complexity," as he calls it, increased in September
when the company, which already had offices in New Delhi and Shanghai,
added Chile. Setting up conference calls requires negotiation. Whose
turn is it to get up at 4 a.m.? Last year Aggarwal hung three extra
clocks in his office: one for New York, one for India and one for
Austria, where Evalueserve's chief executive lives.
Aggarwal's work schedule typically stretches from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.
His only break comes between 4:30 and 7:30 p.m., when the U.S. workday
is winding down, employees in India are still in bed and those in China
are waking up and heading to work.
Many time-zone shifters erase all boundaries between work and life,
never wanting customers, or co-workers with urgent needs, to feel they
are not around or can't be bothered. They sleep with their cellphones,
Treos and BlackBerrys near their pillows.
Arijit Sengupta, chief executive of BeyondCore Inc., a software firm in
Foster City, also in Silicon Valley, says he has answered text messages
from partners and customers in
