Working Through Leave Conceals the Real Cost of Delivery

An employee who takes annual leave to finish an assignment makes an overloaded schedule look workable. The deadline is met, but the recorded workday understates the effort required.

HR and communications leaders describe “work-from-leave” in India as a sign that concentrated work has been pushed outside the normal day. Their accounts do not establish how widespread the practice is. They do show why a completed assignment is an incomplete measure of capacity.

AI adds pressure when managers convert faster execution into more assignments before accounting for checking, coordination, and rework. Research at one US technology company found that generative AI expanded the scope and duration of work. For Indian services teams, the immediate issue is whether productivity gains are being measured within agreed working time.

Completed Work Can Hide a Capacity Gap

“Employees taking leave to get work done in peace reveals that modern workplaces are heavily optimized for collaboration, visibility, and deadlines, rather than deep, focused work,” says Puja Rungta Agarwal, senior director for people practice at Happiest Minds Technologies.

She describes a pattern becoming familiar to younger employees. “What was once driven by individual pressure is now becoming a way of working,” she says. 

Surabhi Sharma, head of people at Zinnia India, focuses on how the day is organized. “It reveals that many organizations are unintentionally designing work around accessibility rather than effectiveness,” she says. “A growing share of the workday is spent staying available, while the time required for concentrated thinking gets pushed to the margins.”

Sourya Banerjee, director for public affairs and strategic communications at Jajabor Brand Consultancy, reaches a similar conclusion. “It signals a structural failure in how work is being organized. The root issue isn’t simply workload, it’s fragmentation.”

When a manager sees the finished assignment but not the leave spent producing it, the next deadline can repeat the same error. The work may be deliverable only because the employee contributed time that the plan never counted.

Agarwal questions the measures managers use. “If people feel more productive outside official work hours, it signals that productivity is still being measured through time spent, responsiveness, physical presence, rather than true value creation.”

Sharma is more specific. “A lot of organizations still rely on proxies for productivity, speed of response, visible activity, and meeting participation. But those signals can be deeply misleading.”

Banerjee explains why such measures persist. “Most organizations still proxy productivity through activity because tracking these factors is easier than comparing work output.”

Output measures alone are also insufficient. Managers need to know the time and conditions required to produce the work. Without that information, an assignment finished during leave looks the same as one completed within a realistic schedule.