Browsing through slashdot.org, my eye was caught by a link to an interesting (and short) blog post written by a man called Jeff Archibald entitled Your 60-hour Work Week Is Not A Badge Of Honour (which you can find here).
Archibald is the co-founder of a design firm in Edmonton, Canada, called Paper Leaf. The basic premise of his blog is that people often take a perverse pride in stating that they work excessive hours.
“Saying you worked a 60-hour week is indirectly telling the listener how busy your design firm is; how successful your product is; how important you are to your employer,” he writes, describing it as a “humblebrag”. For those of you who don’t know what that means (no, I didn’t either), it’s defined in the urban dictionary as “When you, usually consciously, try to get away with bragging about yourself by couching it in a phoney show of humility”.
This phenomenon of people talking about how many more hours they worked than the average 37.5/40 is a common practice in many industries, including IT. In fact, if you believed everything you heard, you might think that 50/60 hour weeks were the norm and 37.5/40 hour weeks were more akin to part-time than full working weeks.
Much of the late working culture has its roots in Japan and the US. Back in the 80s, we were told that people working in Japanese companies often worked late because they didn’t want to be seen to leave before the boss. Whether that was true or an urban myth, there’s definitely an element of that which has crept into today’s working environment. As for the US, what do you expect of a country where they only have two weeks leave a year and nearly every film about holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving seems to be dedicated to focusing on the inconvenience they cause to people’s everyday routines?
Anyway, the point is that, for the most part, European culture has had a much stronger focus on work/life balance, on trying to maintain a regular working week. This still applies in places like France and Germany. For example, in August 2013, Germany’s employment ministry banned managers from calling or e-mailing staff out of hours except in emergencies.
Labour minister Ursula von der Leyen told German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that the rules were drawn up to protect workers’ mental health. “It’s in the interests of employers that workers can reliably switch off from their jobs, otherwise, in the long run, they burn out,” she said, adding “technology should not be allowed to control us and dominate our lives. We should control technology”.
Some of the country’s most famous (and successful) companies, including Volkswagen, BMW, Puma and Deutsche Telekom have also imposed restrictions on out of hours e-mails.
No sign of life
One of the points made by Archibald (and one which I am in almost complete agreement with) is that working long weeks is not a source of pride but a sign of failure. “If you are working 60 hours a week, something has broken down organisationally,” he states, adding “you are far less productive” And there has to be something in that because either you’re inflating your hours to do 40 hours work in 60 hours or you’re being expected to do more work than you can do productively. Neither of those is a good thing.
On that same point, I used to have the heretical thought that if the US could only get by on two weeks holiday a year when Europe could function on four or even five (and employees typically worked longer hours in the US), it suggested US workers were actually less productive than their European counterparts.
I think the long hours culture is a combination of most businesses not having enough resources to employ the people they need and a kind of machismo that people attach to being able to brag about working long hours (although quite why anyone should attribute long hours sitting in front of a screen with being macho is beyond me).
Archibald concludes his blog with the following statement: “We need to stop being proud of overworking ourselves. It’s unhealthy, it stunts the growth of the business, and it’s unsustainable. Instead, we should be proud of creating or working in an environment that is efficient, organised and diligent enough to allow people to work regular hours on meaningful work.”
It’s a measure of where we that although very few people would argue with that statement, many of them will find themselves nodding in agreement with it at work when they really shouldn’t be there.
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