working overtime and Japanese idea of blasting with drone !

Drones have come to stay ~  :  an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot on board. Its flight is either controlled autonomously by computers in the vehicle, or under the remote control of a navigator on the ground or in another vehicle.

A brilliant photo of Madurai taken from a drone (from FB of Manivannan of Madurai)

A couple of decades ago, in life and in Cinema, hardworking people would become by doing extra work in Office, getting Overtime pay.  OT simply is the amount of time someone works beyond normal working hours. Most nations have overtime labour laws designed to dissuade or prevent employers from forcing their employees to work excessively long hours. These laws may take into account other considerations than the humanitarian, such as preserving the health of workers so that they may continue to be productive, or increasing the overall level of employment in the economy. In the modern World, people do work hard, spending extra hours in Office and even at home doing official work – how much they climb or how high they are placed may not be directly proportional to the hours or work put though.

 

Then there are situational demands – of natural disasters.  Out there in US - Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) personnel have been stretched that in the  past three months,  some of its field personnel had  been home just once, for a two-week stretch.  The team has spent  the other dozen weeks amidst calamity.  Some had been  deployed to Texas on Aug. 24, as Hurricane Harvey pummeled Houston. Six weeks later, they flew straight to Puerto Rico, the island struggling to cope with widespread devastation following back-to-back hurricanes, Irma and then Maria. With much of the commonwealth still without power, they had to sleep alongside hundreds of other workers inside a convention center, taking cold showers and bunching up spare clothing to use as a pillow.

Now, FEMA says hundreds of  FEMA employees who pulled double-digit days during this year's massive storms may be forced to pay back some of their overtime pay. Under federal law, government staffer's annual earnings are capped — and following a record-breaking hurricane season, "several hundred" staffers have butted up against their maximums, FEMA confirms to ABC News.  Strange are the rules !

Elsewhere in Singapore, a couple of years back, drones buzzed up to high-rises under construction in Singapore and dropped off cans of Coke to the migrant workers building the towers. Tucked into the care packages were 2,734 messages from Singaporeans thanking the tradesmen for their hard work.  The idea was to link two communities that don't often come into contact - Singaporean nationals and the migrant workers who travel far from their countries to build the city-state's apartment buildings, offices and schools.  Some agencies dubbed it "Happiness From the Skies" that was part of Coke's international campaign called "Where Will Happiness Strike Next?", bringing the brand theme of happiness to places that could use some cheer.  Coke planned to utilize the drone technology to a newer height.  It was strategized to reach out to  migrant workers at building sites, cooming from places including India, China, Bangladesh and Myanmar, who did all that hard work but remained isolated otherwise.   

Hundreds of volunteers from the Singapore Kindness Movement asked ordinary Singaporeans to write messages of support to the migrant workers, then snapped photos of them holding the notes. The photos were tied to Coke cans and delivered to more than 2,500 workers using several drones. When the crafts landed, people weren't always sure how to react.

Anything on work may not be  complete without reference to Japan that  has a culture which encourages overtime out of a sense of loyalty, and that's a serious problem. It not only cuts into family and social life, it leads to entirely avoidable deaths. Taisei (the company behind the main Tokyo 2020 Olympic stadium) aims to fix that in an unusual way: having a drone nag you into going home. Its newly unveiled T-Frend is ostensibly a security drone that surveils the office with its camera, but its specialty is blasting workers with "Auld Lang Syne" (commonly used in Japan to indicate closing time) to force them out of the office. In theory, the music and the drone's own buzzing make it impossible to concentrate.

The drone is autonomous, and doesn't need GPS to find its position. It'll be available in Japan in April as a ¥50,000 ($443) per month service, which largely limits it to mid- and large-sized businesses that can easily justify the cost through improved worker health.  Whether or not T-Frend is effective remains to be seen -- we could see stubborn workers donning noise-cancelling headphones. However, it could contribute to a national effort to create more balanced lifestyles. And it might even be more effective than existing strategies. Right now, overseers at companies frequently find themselves working overtime as they urge staff to avoid those extra hours -- the drone might let everyone punch out on time.

~ and what is happening in your workplace ? do you stay long hours ?? – and do you really take care of your team’s work-life balance.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

8^th Dec 2017.