Tech employees’ work-life balance is off kilter

Amazon’s country manager for India has proposed a radical idea: Log off; get a life.

In an email to his team earlier this month, Amit Agarwal counseled colleagues to stop responding to emails or work calls between 6 pm and 8 am in the interest of “work-life harmony.” He also talked about the importance of work discipline and how to draw the line.

The leaked note has broken through the sleep-deprived haze in the technology hub of Bengaluru and is a topic of heated discussions on social networks and WhatsApp chat groups. Agarwal is a senior vice president at the Seattle-based retail behemoth, which has a reputation of fostering a cutthroat work culture and driving employees to burnout. Many in India wondered if this represented a softer turn for the company. Agarwal has previously served as an executive assistant to Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, who is often painted as ademanding boss. An Amazon representative in India declined to comment on the email.

India, with its more than 1.3 billion people, has become a fierce battleground for Amazon.com, and the company has committed some $5.5 billion to building up its network there. Recently Amazon lost out to Walmart in a bid to buy Flipkart Online Services, India’s leading e-commerce operator.

While the demands of technology on workers has become a topic of debate around the world, work-life balance is severely off kilter in Bengaluru, India’s third-largest city, where a significant portion of the one million workers employed in the outsourcing business cater to global customers and often work late into the night.