Big 4 consulting firm Ernst & Young’s India leadership received a moving letter from the mother of a recently deceased employee on Tuesday, leading to severe social media outrage.
According to people in the know, Anita Augustine, mother of 26-year-old Anna Sebastian Perayil, wrote to EY India Chairman Rajiv Memani, highlighting the toxic work culture at the company’s Pune office.
The letter mentioned how Anna was overworked by her seniors, pressured to clock in extra hours and work weekends, which led to her untimely death.
A copy of the letter was circulated on social media. However, NDTV Profit was unable to reach Anna’s parents for a comment.
“She worked tirelessly at EY and gave her all to meet the demands placed on her. However, the workload, new environment and long hours took a toll on her physically, emotionally and mentally,” Anna’s mother wrote in her letter.
Anna, a resident of Kochi, joined the audit team at the Pune office of SR Batliboi, a member firm of EY Global, only in March. She passed away of a cardiac arrest in July, according to people in the know.
The letter also highlighted the nature of Anna’s work, where her manager would reschedule meetings around cricket matches and assign her work at the end of the day. This would add to the already high workload for Anna, according to her mother.
When Anna joined the audit team, she was warned that many other employees had quit the team owing to the high work load and stress. “Anna, you must stick around and change everyone’s opinion about our team,” she was allegedly told.
Anna would often come home so exhausted that she could not even change before hitting the bed.
Her mother also highlighted EY’s human rights statement, where Memani is a signatory himself. The statement assigns this specific line under employee rights: The right of all people to enjoy a physically and psychologically safe work environment.
According to another person in the know, past and present senior leaders at EY have been intently discussing the case today, where many have pointed out that the work culture needs to slow down to accommodate the health and well-being of employees.
Memani is directly looking into the matter, with the human resources division internally investigating the case, an EY insider said.
However, it is unclear why such an investigation is happening nearly two months after Anna’s death.
“That her promising career was cut short in this tragic manner is an irreparable loss for all of us. While no measure can compensate for the loss experienced by the family, we have provided all the assistance as we always do in such times of distress and will continue to do so,” a spokesperson for EY said in a statement on Wednesday.
“We are taking the family’s correspondence with the utmost seriousness and humility,” the spokesperson said.
Separately, this spokesperson also said that the firm “will continue to find ways to improve and provide a healthy workplace for our 100,000 people across EY member firms in India.”