Microsoft Report Finds Employees Place Mental Wellness Over Work
In their 2022 Work Index Report, Microsoft uncovered a significant shift in how employees balance...
April 21st, 2021
One of the drawbacks of remote work is its effect on the prevalence of overworking. According to a survey conducted by the Los Angeles-based staffing firm Robert Half, nearly 70% of professionals who transitioned to remote work because of the pandemic say they now work on the weekends, and 45% say they regularly work more hours during the week than they did before. Moreover, as Corinne Purtill notes in her article, Companies Can't Stop Overworking, “when offices reopen in earnest, few expect overwork to vanish.”
These results give employers reason for pause. Before companies assume that they can let overwork go unaddressed, they ought to think carefully about whether or not this is a desirable outcome and how they can avoid it if it’s not.
Studies are beginning to confirm what many have long suspected, namely that excess work is bad for employee health. A recent meta-analysis of 243 studies that examined the effects of long working hours on health found a positive correlation between extended hours and cardiovascular disease, hypertension, chronic fatigue, stress, anxiety, poor sleep quality, alcohol use, and smoking.
Some may think that while overwork is bad for employees, it’s not bad for business. After all, how could more working hours not lead to more work being done? This way of thinking is wrong-headed for a number of reasons. To start with, employees who experience negative health effects like cardiovascular disease and hypertension which come with increased mortality rates, likely won’t be working for as many years. On top of that, for the years that they are working, they may need to take time off to treat the illnesses they are suffering from. Lastly, because anxiety, depression, and sleep deprivation have all been linked to a number of cognitive impairments (e.g., impaired attention, working memory, long-term memory, decision-making ability, and cognitive flexibility), employees working extended hours may make more mistakes and get less work done overall than they would have had they simply worked fewer hours.
Some companies have tried to discourage their employees from overworking. In many cases, their efforts have not been successful. This raises the question, if overworking is bad for one’s emotional and physical health, why would anyone continue working 70 plus hours per week when their bosses are telling them not to? In her interview with Purtill, Alexandra Michel, who has been following investment bankers for the past twenty years, offers some potential explanations.
When an organization says ‘we value work-life balance, we want our people to not work on weekends, we want blah blah blah’—there is still this competitive structure where people have an incentive to work all they can because others are doing the same thing, and only winners get rewarded.
In the end, if you ask me, what is the one true fear? […] It’s the loss of social status. It’s not the money. It is that people who formerly looked at you with respect and esteem will all of a sudden ignore you.
This explanation receives some backing by theories in the psychology of motivation. For example, according to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which categorizes and ranks needs or desires in terms of the importance attributed to them, individuals must satisfy their need for esteem, which includes prestige and the feeling of accomplishment, before they can focus on the fifth and final need of “self-actualization.”
Below are a few suggestions employers can practice to reduce employee overwork.
that it will pay a $250 bonus, up to four times a year, to employees who take a full consecutive week of vacation. Boston Consulting introduced options for employees to take up to two months off or reduce their work schedules while remaining on their career tracks
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