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AnonymousInactiveThe Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard…
…and what you can do about it
Honk if this sounds like
you: While much of America is watching Jon Stewart, Letterman, or Leno,
you’re stumbling out the office door into a car-service Town Car or
groping for the clicker to the BMW in the company parking lot. Once
home, you slug down a beer or the last of a bottle of white wine on the
door of the fridge, stuff some leftovers in your mouth, and collapse
into bed beside your sleeping spouse. A half-dozen hours later, you
crawl to the shower, throw on a clean shirt, pour some coffee down your
throat, maybe drop a kid or two at school, and jump back on the
frenetic work treadmill that you can’t shut off.The good news — if there is any, time-challenged amigo — is that you
are not alone. More than 31% of college-educated male workers are
regularly logging 50 or more hours a week at work, up from 22% in 1980.
Forty percent of American adults get less than seven hours of sleep on
weekdays, reports the National Sleep Foundation, up from 31% in 2001.
About 60% of us are sometimes or often rushed at mealtime, and
one-third wolf down lunch at our desks, according to a survey by the
American Dietetic Assn. To avoid wasting time, we’re talking on our
cell phones while rushing to work, answering e-mails during conference
calls, waking up at 4 a.m. to call Europe, and generally multitasking
our brains out.This epidemic of long hours at the office — whether physically or
remotely — defies historical precedent and common sense. Over the past
25 years, the Information Revolution has boosted productivity by almost
70%. So you would think that since we’re producing more in fewer hours,
such gains would translate into a decrease in the workweek — as they
have in the past. But instead of technology being a time-saver, says
Warren Bennis, a University of Southern California professor and author
of such management classics as On Becoming a Leader, “everybody I know
is working harder and longer.”And the long-hour marathons aren’t a result of demanding corporations
exploiting the powerless. Most of the groggy-eyed are the best-educated
and best-paid — college grads whose real wages have risen by more than
30% since the 1980s. That’s a change from 25 years ago, when it was the
lowest-wage workers who were most likely to put in 50 hours or more a
week, according to new research by Peter Kuhn of the University of
California at Santa Barbara and Fernando A. Lozano of Pomona College.With so many managers and professionals stuck at work, there is a
growing consensus among management gurus that the stuck-at-work
epidemic is symptomatic of a serious disorder in the organization of
corporations. The problem, in a nutshell-to-go is this: Succeeding in
today’s economy requires lightning-fast reflexes and the ability to
communicate and collaborate across the globe. Coming up with innovative
ideas, products, and services means getting people across different
divisions and different companies to work together. “More and more
value is created through networks,” says John Helferich, a top
executive and former head of research and development at Masterfoods
usa, a division of Mars Inc. and the maker of such products as
M&Ms. “The guys who are good at it are winning.”Unfortunately, the communication, coordination, and teamwork so
essential for success these days is being superimposed on a corporate
structure that has one leg still in its gray flannel suit. Without
strict gatekeepers (read secretaries), Tom, Jane, and Harry feel free
to plug themselves into your electronic calendar. You and a colleague
in another part of the company may dream up a great idea for a new
product — but it takes months to get approvals from your boss, his
boss, and their boss. Or the corporate bigwigs order you to join a
taskforce that is supposed to promote collaboration and innovation —
but it ends up taking a big chunk of your time. And no matter how many
layers of management were supposed to be taken out, there always seem
to be more people on the e-mail distribution lists.You are not imagining things. Despite years of cutting corporate bloat,
managers are a much bigger share of the workforce than they were 15
years ago. “We’ve added a new set of standards without fully dropping
the old,” says Thomas H. Davenport, professor of information technology
and management at Babson College and author of the new book Thinking
for a Living.That helps explain why time pressures seem to be getting worse.
Globalization and the Internet create great new opportunities, but they
also ratchet up the intensity of competition and generate more work —
especially with the existing corporate structure still hanging on
tightly. “Nobody wants to give up their territory or their control,”
says Shoshana Zuboff, a former professor at Harvard Business School.
Adds Lowell Bryan, a McKinsey & Co. director: “Professionals are
still being managed as if they were in factories, in organizations
designed to keep everybody siloed. At less well-run companies, you’re
struck by how frustrated people are. They work like dogs and are
wasting time.”Make that lots of time. Fully 25% of executives at large companies say
their communications — voice mail, e-mail, and meetings — are nearly
or completely unmanageable. That’s according to a new McKinsey survey
of more than 7,800 managers around the world. Nearly 40% spend a half
to a full day per week on communications that are not valuable. Other
surveys echo similar results. “We’re making our people compete with
sandbags strapped to their legs,” says Zuboff.A Digital Spine
There is hope, however, and the promise of at least partial liberation
from the tyranny of time constraints. Why? Because the long-term
interests of individuals and smart companies are aligned. To compete,
successful corporations will have to make it easier and less
time-consuming for their employees to collaborate. They will learn how
to live with fewer time-sapping meetings and unnecessary feedback loops
— or find themselves outrun by more nimble competitors. The eventual
result: less frustration for knowledge workers.Moves in this direction are already under way as savvy companies
analyze their internal social networks and identify bottlenecks. Intel
Corp. (INTC ), for example, sees an opportunity in creating technology
that lowers the time cost of teamwork. And others, such as Eli Lilly
& Co. (LLY ), are providing more corporate support for both
internal and external networks. “It’s a new mental model for how you
run a company,” says McKinsey’s Bryan. “The winners will be those who
can handle more complexity.”At the same time we may see a rise in new forms of Web-based
organizations where people can contribute without having their time
eaten up by existing hierarchy. Blogs, collaborative online databases
(called wikis) and open-source software development all use the Net to
handle much of the coordination among people rather than relying on
top-down command and control. Such a shift to a digital spine could
eventually lessen bureaucratic time burdens on overworked
professionals, especially those in such high-cost industries as health
care.If history is any guide, the stuck-at-work epidemic will turn out to be
a transitional phase. Historically, as countries and individuals get
richer, they work less. Look at the late 19th century, when the U.S.
was still a relatively poor country, with a per capita income about
equal to that of China today. Back then the typical male household head
had precious little leisure time, perhaps only about 1.8 hours a day,
on average, after subtracting time for work, chores, and meals. The
average factory worker put in about 60 hours a week, with only one day
off. Indeed, the first May Day labor demonstrations, in 1886, were
driven by the demand for an eight-hour day.Over time, as U.S. productivity and incomes rose, work hours dropped
and leisure time increased. It was no coincidence that the five-day
work week was first introduced in 1926 by Henry Ford, a decade after he
pioneered high-efficiency, mass-production methods.By 1970 the 40-hour workweek was the norm. And, at least until
recently, European and Asian countries have followed the same
trajectory of declining work hours. Since 1991 average annual work
hours have dropped by 11% in Japan, 10% in France, 6% in Germany and
Britain, and 5% in South Korea. Meanwhile, average monthly work hours
in Taiwan are down by 7% over the same stretch. Even work hours in
China, while still much higher than in the U.S., may be coming down.
“Asians are poorer and still working like crazy,” says Alberto Alesina,
a Harvard University economics professor who has studied international
work hours. “But as they get richer, they are taking more leisure.”The one real exception to the rule has been the U.S. Since 1991 the
U.S. has grown substantially faster than Europe and Japan.
Nevertheless, average annual work hours are down by less than 2%, and
that includes all the low-skilled workers who are in less demand today.Interestingly, there are signs that global competition is forcing
Europeans to start moving away from their tradition of shorter work
hours. The number of Germans working more than 40 hours a week rose
sharply last year, to 5.3 million from 4.7 million. Siemens (SI ),
DaimlerChrysler (DCX ), Deutsche Bahn, and many smaller companies have
been able to increase work hours without corresponding increases in
pay. French workers seem to be putting in more hours in the past year
or two as well.European executives are sounding more and more like their American
counterparts. “Ten years ago, if I was on a business trip, I’d get to
my hotel in the evening, and there might be a message or two from my
secretary and a couple of faxes,” says Philippe Midy, a Paris-based
executive at McDonald’s (MCD ) Europe who travels extensively around
the Continent dealing with supply and logistics issues. Now there’s a
deluge. “Sometimes I’m answering e-mails at 2 a.m.”At least at the moment, long hours are part of the price to be paid for
faster growth, especially if you work for a multinational. “If you are
going to be a participant in economic activity that is part of a
globalized market,” says Stephen S. Roach, chief economist for Morgan
Stanley (MWD ), “you need to be prepared to stretch beyond 9 to 5.”Companies have been willing to pay big bucks for those longer hours.
Over the past 15 to 20 years, people working a 40-hour week received
virtually no increase in real pay, according to research by Kuhn and
Lozano. Yet employees putting in a 55-hour week saw their real pay rise
by 14%. The implication: The gains of two decades of growth have mainly
gone to ambitious — or fearful — Americans who are working longer
hours.But even high pay can’t compensate for unrelenting time pressure. Top
managers have to realize that encouraging networks and collaboration
demands as much attention and resources as supervising and measuring
performance in traditional ways. Most companies have built up large
human-resources departments, but few have a department of
collaboration. “Most managers don’t manage social networks
effectively,” says Babson’s Davenport.At Intel, the drive to reduce the time spent sharing knowledge and
collaborating is an outgrowth of efforts to better coordinate far-flung
operations that stretch from Israel to India. One idea being pursued by
Luke Koons, director for information and knowledge management, is
“dynamic profiling” — technologies that automatically summarize areas
on which a researcher or a manager is focusing, based on the subjects
of their e-mails and Web searches. Such a regularly updated profile
could make it less time-consuming to locate potential collaborators and
resources, an especially daunting prospect in a large,
innovation-minded company such as Intel. Equally important, dynamic
profiling doesn’t force individuals to spend hours manually updating
their profiles as their focus changes.The Off Switch
There’s plenty of demand for new technologies that more efficiently
foster collaboration, such as software that allows virtual meetings,
where everyone doesn’t need to be present simultaneously. “Our
communication tools are woefully inadequate,” says Alph Bingham, a top
executive at Eli Lilly who is vice-president of e.Lilly. “We are still
relying on sticking everyone in a room and hammering it out. It’s
untenable globally.”Another time-eater: all the meetings and e-mails required to manage
details of a collaboration or partnership. “Organizations need to
recognize that when you engage in collaboration, there’s another level
of complexity,” says Bingham. Part of the solution is to hire people
for a new type of position devoted to facilitating or managing networks
and relationships. Lilly, for example, created a new internal group —
almost like ombudsmen — to manage communications among Lilly
scientists and myriad outside partners. “This allows the scientists to
dedicate less of their time to the collaboration,” says Bingham.Adding new software and more people to reduce the cost of collaboration
is great — as long as it doesn’t create even more work. To really ease
the work overload — and, not coincidentally, make corporations more
nimble — it’s also essential to identify and eliminate unnecessary
interactions. “Sometimes people need to remind themselves that there is
an off switch — and use it,” says Paul Saffo, a director at the
Institute for the Future, a think tank based in Palo Alto, Calif.
“Solitude is the scarce resource in business lives — having that time
when you are disconnected and realizing that everything will go along
fine without you.”To reduce time pressures — and hike productivity — the number of
low-value interactions must be cut. “The usual assumption is that more
collaboration is better,” says Rob Cross, an assistant professor at the
University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce who also runs
Network Roundtable, a research group whose members include Schlumberger
(SLB ), Microsoft (MSFT ), Intel, Merck (MRK ), and BP. “But it’s
important to ask not just where we need to build and connect but where
do we need to let go?”By having workers fill out a 15- to 20-minute online survey, Cross can
chart who people communicate with, how much time is spent preparing for
which meetings, and where the bottlenecks are. “Then I ask executives:
‘What decisions are you making that others can make?”‘ says Cross. “Are
there aspects of your role that you could let go of?”Masterfoods used this methodology to map out how its product
development, packaging, and process-development staff spent their time.
The results were surprising. “When we looked at the data, it turned out
that it was too hard to do business internally,” says Helferich, then
head of Masterfoods’ R&D. People had to talk to 30 or 40 other
people just to get their jobs done, which took away from their time to
work on new ideas. Notes Helferich: “We were high-density on task and
low-density on innovation.” Now Masterfoods is in the process of
redesigning the workflow of the packaging group to eliminate a lot of
the extraneous steps that took up time.If you are high enough in your organization, you can simply choose when
to make yourself unavailable. Bryan, one of McKinsey’s top consultants,
says he has given up cell phones and computers, letting others handle
his communications. “I never had time to think,” says Bryan. “It’s
amazing how much you can get done if you don’t spend all your time
interacting.”Many of the most overloaded managers are not yet at a level where they
have the luxury of controlling their schedules or dispensing with
unproductive e-mails, pesky voice mails, and interminable meetings. But
in terms of reducing work overload, perhaps the biggest and most
difficult step will be for corporations to give their knowledge workers
more freedom over their own time. “The Industrial Age approach to
management dies a pretty tough death,” says Babson’s Davenport. “Even
today people end up being evaluated not only on how much they produce
but also on how many hours they are in the office.”Of course, there’s one shiny new example of where output matters more
than process: the Web. Nobody cares how long it took or what time of
night it was when someone wrote a blog entry — all that’s seen is the
final result. Similarly, the success of open-source development
projects such as Linux and Apache, the most popular Web server
software, rests on the competence of the programmers involved, not on
how many hours they log.Reclaiming Your Life
The web model may give a glimpse of a less overloaded way of life that
lets people take charge of their time while still making a decent
living and a real contribution to society. Take Ted Husted, a
46-year-old freelance software consultant who lives in a Rochester
(N.Y.) suburb. These days he consults 32 hours a week, remotely, for
the Oklahoma Environmental Quality Dept., down from 40 as recently as
this summer. But he also spends 10 to 15 hours a week as a major
contributor to the Apache open-source software project.Now he has time on weekends to watch his kids play sports. He goes out
to lunch with his wife, Barb, every Monday. And he even has time left
over to contain the fast-growing maple trees on his corner lot.
Meanwhile, his work on the open-source project garners him visibility
and respect among his peers. “I think I can keep this pace up
indefinitely,” says Husted. “But I have to have discipline about it.
Now I make sure there’s at least one day when I don’t even touch a
keyboard.”Few people will ever make a living as a blogger or a contributor to an
open-source software project. But there is pressure to find new ways of
organizing work, from both corporations and overworked individuals. “In
terms of hours, I keep thinking we’re on the verge of a backlash,” says
Babson’s Davenport.Try telling that to Ken Middleton, director of convention sales for
Houston’s Convention & Visitors Bureau. In the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, he has been putting in grueling 70-hour weeks
hustling to find space for meetings that had been scheduled for New
Orleans. Even in normal times, though, he works 55 hours a week,
including four to six hours on weekends. Does he feel overworked?
“Absolutely — but doesn’t everyone? My wife says I need to get a hobby
and stick to it. There isn’t time for that right now.” Who has even a
moment for a backlash? -
AuthorSeptember 27, 2005 at 12:15 PM
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