The top two-thirds of the front page of the January 27th
New York Times business section showed
a bold picture. Drawn in red, yellow,
and black Soviet-mural style, it had three present-day, youngish adults,
holding a portfolio, a smartphone, and a computer tablet, at attention and indicating
support for something, with, below them, a commuter train and platform and in
large letters “TGIM!” (Thank God It’s Monday).
The headline of the Erin Griffith article said “Drudge Report,” and the
next largest type asked “How did millennial workaholism become an aspirational
lifestyle?”
Before I get into this piece, I’ll tell you what it got me
thinking about. I worked for 14 years,
1988 to 2002, in AT&T information-technology-related cubicle jobs. I was outstanding at such fringe attributes
as organizing and managing my time and work, focusing my efforts, and
accomplishing a great deal, to the point where I wrote and was paid to give a
presentation on those things titled “Ten Free Hours a Week.” The one thing I did not do, though, was work
extra hours. While my management
occasionally postured about a general need for the likes of me to do that, they
never required it, and I was never admonished either formally or informally for
not staying longer. The mini-analysis I
did showed that, even if such behavior meant more pay and a slightly higher
chance of promotion, it would have an expectation of only a few dollars per
hour.
However, many of my peers took a different approach. Some were in the office – working from home was
then only emerging there – sixty or seventy hours per week, the overage unpaid
of course, and made sure that everyone knew that. Productivity and performance, in that
environment where constructive criticism was rare and supervisors seemed to
ignore differences between employees, varied absurdly – in fact, I once told my
boss that I was doing from two to ten times as much work as any of my five
similar-job coworkers. People took
divergent views on what tasks they should be doing, a critically important
judgment area in a setting with little outside control. I cannot determine how much my or their
approaches hurt or helped them, but never saw any correlation between hours
worked and promotions received.
Time worked, though, varies with companies. I was there not long after Ross Perot’s
Electronic Data Systems became infamous for people being expected to work extra-long
hours. And while some set expectations
for that during hiring, it was and is informal pressure that drives that.
That brings me back to the article, which showed how
forcefully some of today’s cubicle workers are being persuaded to put in more
time. According to what Griffith wrote,
the main perpetrators are not only specific CEOs or proprietors, such as
multiple-business owner Gary Vaynerchuk, but a commercial workspace
provider. Apparently, if your office is in
a WeWork facility, you are treated to throw pillows, neon signs, and even
cucumbers in water coolers bearing messages such as “hustle harder,” and “don’t
stop when you’re tired.” The piece is
lacking in any indication of how many people live this way, but WeWork’s count
of 400,000 tenants, and its $47 billion market valuation, mean that it’s more
than a few.
So what are the problems with that? At the top of the list is what I thought of
over and over while reading the article:
the philosophy is self-serving. One37pm,
Tesla, and Quora, three companies Griffith cited, would prefer to hire fewer people
by getting dozens of unpaid hours from those they get, representing massive
savings. Another is confusion between
the founders’ efforts, which are entrepreneurial, and the employees’, which are
not. Working for a fast-moving new
company does not make you an entrepreneur – if you want that, you can start one
of your own. Business owners put in huge
amounts of time, which they accept since they have a chance of earning not
something like $140,000 per year plus benefits but multiples of that, or, if at
a smaller scale, making a living from doing something they fully control. (We cannot validly compare these expectations
to those given new lawyers motivated by the business-ownership rewards of firm
partnership.) If they, per a former
Yahoo CEO, “are strategic” about sleep, bathing, and even trips to the
bathroom, that is toward knowing that they, not their management or business
owners, will fully benefit from everything they achieve. The language Griffith relates is full of such
independent-firm references, most insidiously Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk exhorting his non-business-owning employees that “nobody ever changed the world
on 40 hours a week.” Extra benefits such
as bringing in lunch food and providing ping-pong tables, while of value, are
transparent efforts to maximize work time.
Hiring a mercenary third party, whether WeWork or another, to push long
hours is ultimately cowardly. And even
the slogan is wrong – if you are working seven days a week, what is significant
about Monday?
As long as there are businesses, there will be crazes. In 1970’s Up
the Organization, Robert Townsend torpedoed “synergy” by calling it “a
business fad like hula hoops, which holds that two plus two makes five.” After an appropriate if ineloquent barnyard
epithet, he said that “two plus two usually makes three, and you know it.” To name more, in the 1980s we had adoration
of anything Japanese, before we found out that that country’s success was
illusory and unsustainable; in the 1990s, unrestricted telecommuting got us less
work, when employees who could not succeed in environments designed for getting
things done went home to their handpicked distractions. And here we have another.
If this “hustling” propagates, what will happen? People will burn out, and what would have
been company-beneficial 20-year careers won’t make it to five. Businesses will lose lawsuits, when juries
determine that heart attacks, strokes, and other excessive-stress results were
their fault. People will write reams of
articles and stacks of books, devastating cubicle-job employers in general as
well as the specific companies involved.
We may even see France-style legal restrictions on what workers can be
required to do outside of normal business hours. And even production will be a disappointment,
as the studies, showing that hourly work accomplished after 45 or 50 per week
first drops off then crashes, are verified.
The trend, if this is one, is as detrimental as any business fad I have
ever seen – let’s hope for all of our sake that it does, indeed, go the way of
hula hoops.
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