The culture of overworking is often associated with the tech or finance industry. While some experts say that the glorification of work started at the turn of the millennia and others pin it on the spread of mercantilism in the 16th century. David Spencer, teaching economics at Leeds University Business School put forward, “There has been an ongoing struggle by employers to venerate work in ways that distract from its unappealing features.”
Some people don’t believe in the rat race yet they participate in it out of fear. As Bernie Klinder, a consultant for a tech company remarked, “If your peers are competitive, working a ‘normal workweek’ will make you look like a slacker.” He is not alone in experiencing this fear, a parent left an anonymous employee review on the app called Blind and expressed, “I fear losing my job if I reduce my work hours.”
In his tweet, Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, mentioned how the number of working hours put in by people varies but further added, “But nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” Expressing his thoughts on the optimum number of hours required for success, he said, “about 80 sustained, peaking about 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”
In 2016, the then chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, outlined that workers can achieve 130 working hours per week, “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”
Society also plays an important role in determining the work culture. Japan is famous for its overworking culture to the extent that people dying at their desks due to work exhaustion is not unheard of. The term for it is “karoshi” and it translates to death from overworking. Japanese tend to put in around 60 hours per week while Americans often boast about working around the same hours.
Many people see toxic productivity as the public’s way of replacing organized religion. Aidan Harper, who spearheads a European campaign called 4 Day Week, working to reduce workdays in a week, described it as, “It’s [toxic productivity] creating the idea that Elon Musk is your high priest. You’re going into your church every day and worshiping at the altar of work.”
Talking about the culture of overwork in the tech industry, Paul Saffo, a professor at Stanford University, commented, “The notion of the overwork culture in Silicon Valley happens because innovation is really hard. But now that the climate has changed, we have a whole new set of issues.”
According to Harper, the companies who demand constant work from their employees engage in dehumanizing the workforce and creating toxicity. He said, “It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity.”
Japan Panasonic is one of the first revolutionary companies in the country that has started 4- day work weeks while arranging for flexible work conditions. The other companies to join the movement are Shionogi and Encourage Technologies. In the U.S., the tech startup named Bolt is doing the same after it saw an increase in the employees’ productivity and wellness during its trial period of giving Fridays off.
In 2021, the research done by ADP Research Institute revealed that workers are doing 9.2 hours of unpaid overtime weekly on average to cover the additional workload created because of the pandemic and people leaving their jobs. Moreover, WFH has resulted in people never getting the chance to log out from work completely as they are contacted digitally constantly via emails, texts, etc. for meetings, projects, and more. Additionally, people are reportedly engaging in presenteeism more during the pandemic and are taking astoundingly less number of sick days, as evidenced by an ONS survey done in the U.K. Read about the college loans.
In 2021, Mind Share Partners’ 2021 Mental Health at Work Report was published in which the data on mental health challenges, stigma surrounding the topic of mental health, and workplace culture of 2019 and 2021 were compared. The findings of the report were:
Seemingly, some companies are taking note of their employees’ dilemma regarding work from home whilst tackling family-related responsibilities. Kenly Walker, a spokeswoman for LinkedIn, said, “Many of our employees are having to take on additional responsibilities at home with children out of school or parents who need care, and we are supporting them.”
In an email to the managers, Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s senior vice president of global rides and platform, instructed, “Please lead with empathy as you help balance work and at-home needs, and be flexible where you can if they need to reschedule, be offline at certain times, or need some variable time off.”
A spokeswoman for Apple, Kristin Huguet said, “No deadline is too important, and no priority is more urgent, than caring for our loved ones. Our goal is to be flexible, collaborative, and accommodating of every parent and caregiver on our teams. This is a trying time for everyone — especially parents — and we want to do all we can to support every member of our Apple family.”
Klinder, upon his decision to follow five 11-hour days per week, explained, “I try to keep in mind that if I dropped dead tomorrow, all of my acrylic workplace awards would be in the trash the next day… and my job would be posted in the paper before my obituary.”
In a column on LinkedIn, Melinda Gates wrote that the increase in working hours per week is damaging to the public, especially women who still majorly take up household responsibilities. As she suggested, the fix to this is to hire while keeping diversity in mind, execute pro-family policies, and have mentoring programs in place.
If the trends of the pandemic are to be noticed, one can venture a guess that COVID-19 is not going anywhere anytime soon. Jennifer Davis, Dell’s senior vice president of global communications, rightly said, “Work will not return to how it was. We need to advertise the need for flexibility and that it’s OK to have a work and home life.” Sally Maitlis, professor at the University of Oxford observed correctly, “The pandemic has been powerful not only in making salient many of the things that matter most – health, family, relationships – and in disrupting some of the routines and systems that were keeping people on the treadmill.”
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