If you work any kind of corporate job it’s highly likely that you’ll hear any of the following on an almost daily basis: “good job, all those extra hours you put in really paid off”, “I always eat lunch at my desk”, “yes… worked late again yesterday”, “… are you staying late too?”, “I know you must have worked so many long hours to get the project done”, “I’m really impressed at the hours you dedicate…”, “what a team, you all went over and above… working late, working weekends, sacrificing vacation…”, and so on.
The workaholic culture — particularly in the United States — serves to reinforce the notion that hard work is actually to be rewarded and reinforced. Many just seem to confuse long hours for persistence and resilience. On the surface it seems to be a great win for the employer: get more hours out of your employees, and it’s free. Of course, recent analyses of work-life balance show that pushing employees beyond a certain number of hours is thoroughly counterproductive — beyond the deleterious effects on employees the quality of the work suffers too. But it turns out that a not insignificant number of wily subordinates may actually be gaming the 80-hour workweek. And, don’t forget the other group of hard-workers — those who do endless hours of so-called “busy work” just to look hardworking.
What happened to just encouraging and incentivizing employees, and bosses, for working smartly, rather than just hard? Reward long hours and there is no incentive for innovation or change; reward smartness and creativity thrives. The current mindset may take generations to alter — you’ll easily come across the word “hardworking” in the dictionary, but you’ll have no luck finding “smartworking“.
From the NYT:
Imagine an elite professional services firm with a high-performing, workaholic culture. Everyone is expected to turn on a dime to serve a client, travel at a moment’s notice, and be available pretty much every evening and weekend. It can make for a grueling work life, but at the highest levels of accounting, law, investment banking and consulting firms, it is just the way things are.
Except for one dirty little secret: Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.
Many of them were, at least, at one elite consulting firm studied by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. It’s impossible to know if what she learned at that unidentified consulting firm applies across the world of work more broadly. But her research, publishedin the academic journal Organization Science, offers a way to understand how the professional world differs between men and women, and some of the ways a hard-charging culture that emphasizes long hours above all can make some companies worse off.
Ms. Reid interviewed more than 100 people in the American offices of a global consulting firm and had access to performance reviews and internal human resources documents. At the firm there was a strong culture around long hours and responding to clients promptly.
“When the client needs me to be somewhere, I just have to be there,” said one of the consultants Ms. Reid interviewed. “And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting.”
Some people fully embraced this culture and put in the long hours, and they tended to be top performers. Others openly pushed back against it, insisting upon lighter and more flexible work hours, or less travel; they were punished in their performance reviews.
The third group is most interesting. Some 31 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women whose records Ms. Reid examined managed to achieve the benefits of a more moderate work schedule without explicitly asking for it.
They made an effort to line up clients who were local, reducing the need for travel. When they skipped work to spend time with their children or spouse, they didn’t call attention to it. One team on which several members had small children agreed among themselves to cover for one another so that everyone could have more flexible hours.
A male junior manager described working to have repeat consulting engagements with a company near enough to his home that he could take care of it with day trips. “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said, adding that he generally kept weekend work down to two hours of catching up on email.
Despite the limited hours, he said: “I know what clients are expecting. So I deliver above that.” He received a high performance review and a promotion.
What is fascinating about the firm Ms. Reid studied is that these people, who in her terminology were “passing” as workaholics, received performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues. For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads.
It calls to mind the episode of “Seinfeld” in which George Costanza leaves his car in the parking lot at Yankee Stadium, where he works, and gets a promotion because his boss sees the car and thinks he is getting to work earlier and staying later than anyone else. (The strategy goes awry for him, and is not recommended for any aspiring partners in a consulting firm.)
Read the entire article here.