Working overtime may lead to promotion, but it can ruin your life, writes Charlotte Denny
The Japanese have a name for it: karoshi – death through overwork. During the recent Japanese financial crisis, a 38-year-old accountant employed by the failed securities firm Yamaichi worked 14 days straight without a break and then went home to bed and died in his sleep.
Karoshi is the extreme result of the Japanese penchant for working long hours. Junior executives aren’t allowed to leave the office until the boss has gone home. A recent study of the families of 200 karoshi victims found that 66% of the victims were working 60 or more hours a week.
But working longer hours is becoming increasingly common throughout the corporate world. In Britain and the United States, the post-war trend for average weekly working hours to fall has gone into reverse as workers put in long days to avoid being the next victim of corporate downsizing. Managers, petrified of being labelled as less than committed to their careers, are competing to see who can work most hours.
And the work doesn’t end when they leave the office. A recent survey showed that 66% of British managers take work home each evening and 40% work over the weekend.
Professor Gary Cooper, psychologist and expert on workplace stress at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, thinks “presenteeism” is becoming the workplace disease of the Nineties.
In a recent report, he and colleagues summarised a range of studies from throughout the world which agree that long hours are harmful for people’s physical and mental health. Long hours mean workers who are ill, says Cooper.
The impact goes beyond just health, affecting family life, marriages and even mortality rates. Countries with a pattern of two-earner families, like the US and Britain, have higher divorce rates.
“When you work long hours it will start to gradually erode and damage family life,” says Cooper.
This might seem like common sense to people who know from bitter experience how hard it is to give quality time to a partner and children when exhausted after a long week. But despite complaining about stress, many managers continue to put in hours of unpaid overtime.
New work from two economists at the University of Essex suggests that white-collar workers are behaving rationally, in the short term at least, by agreeing to work longer hours. Alison Booth and Marco Francesconi have discovered that employees who put in the extra time have a significantly better chance of promotion.
“Working long hours acts as a proxy for effort,” they write. “Firms back-load compensation [promotion and better pay] to elicit higher levels of effort from workers.”
Cooper says he is depressed but not surprised at their findings. “What organisations are doing is seizing on the visible signs of commitment – long hours – and rewarding people for that, not performance.”
What they should be asking themselves is why their employees need to spend so much time at their desks. “They can’t be working efficiently.”
And while there will be short-term rewards for the firm from the extra hours, people become progressively less effective.
Over the medium term, it will have a negative effect on their productivity, and eventually it will start to cost the firm as employees fall sick owing to stress, or leave for greener pastures and shorter hours.
Companies are demanding a lot of overtime from personnel at the moment because often they have cut staff levels to the bone. Fear of further cutbacks is itself a motivating factor for remaining staff.
Cooper says firms need to tackle the whole culture of overwork. “There are a lot of hidden costs; you find people taking sick days or quitting.” But there is an issue of principle as well: employers should be looking at employee welfare.
Cooper says until companies start taking this approach, the average manager will probably look at promotion prospects and decide that it’s worth putting in the extra hours. “But in the longer term, if you continually work long hours, it condemns your health.”
ENDS