Work Smart, not Late When overtime spurts turn into bogs, the stage is set for anxiety, depression, stress and spectacular failures on the job.
Heading for the lift at 6 is being increasingly viewed in work-places as the sign of a flunk mentality, someone who’s clearly not on their way ‘up’ in any sense of the word. Overtime (OT) is seen by most employers and employees as a fact of working life today, a virtual pre-requisite for a raise in pay or status. From management’s point of view, view, overtime is assumed to be the most obvious way to achieve maximal output without hiring extra manpower,
The assumption, of course by not management and workers, is that output increase in direct mathematical progression with the number of hours worked. That is, if someone produces, say, 16 units of output (physical or mental) in eight hours, they will produce 18 units in nine hours and 20 units in tem hors.
Is that assumption valid? In a word, briefly. That is, it may be valid in the limited case where the hours of work are extended over a brief period, for example to meet a looming deadline. You can get more work out of more hours for several days to a couple of months, depending upon how much longer the workday is. That’s the essential logic behind OT’s otherwise inexplicable popularity.
But research and long experience have shown that the limits to such overtime spurts are reached sooner than most employers and employees realize. And when those limits are reached, the spurts turn into bogs. This law of diminishing returns has been common knowledge among industrial engineers for more than a century. In 1893, long before the U.K. government made it’s move to introduce a shorter, work-week, the pioneering employer William Mather (scion of the family business of Mather & Platt Ltd.), had taken an initiative on his own. With his shrewd judgment, he had come to the conclusion that the long working week of 53 ½ hours did not allow his workers that time for leisure which he deemed necessary to their well-being. What’s more and this appears to have been the clincher it seemed commonsensical to him that shorter working hours, by abolishing fatigue, would involve no loss of output. With his characteristic boldness, Mather reduced the daily work hours at his plant from 9 to 8- and, before long, saw daily output increase, just as he had believe it would.
A couple of decades and a continent away, in the face of bitter criticism fro, the National Association of Manufacturers, Henry Ford famously adopted his 40-hours workweek. He’d been conducting experiments for about 12 years before that, which had nudged him to the inescapable conclusion that cutting the workday from ten hours to eight hours, and the work-week from six days to five days, increased output and reduced production costs.
Mather and Ford were neither the first nor the last to figure it out. More than a century of studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the armed forces show that long-term useful work output is maximized at eight hours a say, five days a week. Productivity starts to drop very quickly upon the transition to 60-hour weeks (say, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week). The fall-off becomes obvious within a week….. and just keeps sliding on downhill from there. The total work that people get done is about the same as what they would have got done in two months of 40-hours weeks, research shows, Beyond that, the costs utterly overwhelm the extra hours that are being put in.
More than a century of studies show that long term work output is maximized at eight hours a day, five days a week.
‘QOL’… GOING, GOING Crunch those numbers. Because there’s more that will have you grinding your teeth. It’s not just productivity figures that go into counter-productive mode with overtime. More important at the personal levels is the fact that Quality of Life (QOL), including emotional health, begins to go into a slow but definite nose-dive when you take on that big, schedule-busting OT monster. At the bleary heights of Crunch Mode, not only have you lost all the gains those extra hours brought, you’ve also turned into one tried, angry, burned-out worker.
Even if you’re doing OT with a relatively low workload, there will be pronounced effects on your sleep patterns: problems of unwinding at bedtime, shorter sleep duration, daytime drowsiness. If you suffer sleep deprivation over a short term, you may be able to maintain accuracy on work tasks, but your speed will slow down. The risk escalate with increased sleep deprivation. Being awake for 21 hours has been found to impair drivers to the point of legal drunkenness. And lab studies show that mental work declines by 25% during each successive 24 hours or continuous wakefulness. On the tasks degrades faster with sleep loss than does physical performance. For that reason, the productivity decline of those in the knowledge and information industries begins sooner and may be higher than in those whose work primarily requires the use of physical faculties.
Reducing sleep as little as one or two hours nightly can result in a severe decline in your mental functioning, sometimes without your being aware of the effects. For instance, in a study at the University of Pennsylvania, those who slept only six hours a night for 14 consecutive nights showed significant deficits in mental performance equivalent to going without any sleep for up to three days, in a row. Yet these subjects reported feeling only slightly sleepy and were unaware of how impaired they were. (Emphasis mine).
There are other unpleasant effects of overtime on emotional health and QOL, research confirms. Just a week of overtime, with a higher workload, has been linked to the release of increased amounts of cortisol, the stress hormone. The most recent study, published this June in The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, found that overtime puts both, men and women, at risk for higher levels of anxiety and depression. The more OT, the greater the risk, but even moderate overtime appeared to bump up the risk of “mental distress”.
These latest findings, of course, only reinforce what independent organizations like Verite have found in workplaces around the globe, including India ad China. Sadness and depression are “clear costs correlated with long work hors”, Verite reports. Its studies also found that excessive overtime produced stress and stress-related ailments including high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes.
And as the health effects of consecutive long hors accumulate, they have a negative synergistic effect on again productivity. One of the biggest productivity. One of the biggest productivity sinks created by excessive overtime is the increase in the number of errors you end up making When daily fatigue gets eventually compounded by cumulative fatigue, a combination of slowdown and errors takes over, setting the stage for malfunctions that run the range from dippy goof-ups to spectacular failure you may commit errors that blow schedules, create cost over-runs, trash valuable files, damage expensive equipment, or even if, say, you’re a plant worker cause serious injury to yourself or a co-worker.
Or worse: Just recently, we heard and read in horror about an Air-India plane over-shooting Mumbai on the last leg of its Dubai-Jaipur-Mumbai run because both pilots were fatigued and asleep in the cockpit. Some of the work’s worst disasters have, in fact, occurred because of critical errors made by exhausted workers. The official report on the Space Challenger mishap said that “lack of sleep may have contributed significantly” to a flawed decision to launch made during a critical teleconference. The final report on America’s worst oil spill., the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, found the direct cause to be the behavior of the third mate who had slept only 6 hours in the previous 48 and was severely sleep-deprived. The roster of catastrophes is endless.
If there’s more than a century’s worth of research that Crunch Mode is grossly, destructively and expensively inefficient, then why are both employers and employees still opting to go often hand-in-had down that precipitous incline? Well, don’t we already know why? For a species that vaunts the highest level of intelligence, homo sapiens can sometimes do the dumbest things.
DEALING WITH WORKDAY EROSION Putting in the occasional late hour (S) on the job has its place, let’s accept it. A power breakdown that throws things out of kilter, a deal about to be clinched with half an hour’s extra work, a meeting called to announce your assignment to an important project these are worth staying in late for. But out-of-control OT is the kind you’re putting in either because you’re not managing you workload efficiently, or because you’re succumbing to pressure from a senior who thinks that every good employee must stay late. Let’s see hoe you can get back on track by shedding some old blinkers and developing a few new perspectives:
Check it out: Where do your working hours go? Most people labor under a delude perception: If a person is working late, she must be doing fantastic work. More likely, what she’s been doing is diddling around all day, lingering over a business lunch or having half-hour coffee-and-chitchat breaks. Add to that countless interruptions from often personal, sometimes lengthy phone calls, excursions to the water cooler, dropping in on colleagues on the way back and you’ll see where your 8-hours day went. It was a victim to Workday Erosion. It’s no wonder then that your actual working day seems to begin only after everyone (except other inefficiency experts) has gone home. A study on 2,500 IBM managers found no correlation whatsoever between effectiveness ratings and the number of working hors put in. “It’s the quality of time put in,” noted the industrial psychologists who headed the study, “not the quantity.
Get your priorities crystal clear. At the workplace, work comes first, not socializing or armchair psychologizing . Try setting goals on an hourly schedule. (“I’ll get this done before lunch, and that before the 3 o’clock meeting.”) Set up quiet times during the day of concentration on your work and make them public. Yes, one of those hotel room style “Do Not disturb” signs is perfectly in order.
Identify snags in the office work flow. And then take steps to ensure something is done about them. Meetings that run long, organizational red tape these are the obvious kind of time sapping snags. But there are less obvious productivity suckers that could be draining your time just as easily: e-mail spam or a disorganized work-desk, to name only two. There are ways of getting a handle on these common time trippers You’re just for to get down to doing what it takes.
Take a long hard look at those ‘crisis’ situations. If you find that you are being asked to stay late or work weekends far too often because a ‘crisis’ has blown up, take a long hard look at those ‘crises’. You may well find that senior staff is manufacturing regular crises.
Flaunt your efficiency. When you make your departure in the evening, having put in a day’s hard work, don’t be apologetic or self-conscious about it. Talk up your time management expertise. Make it know that, for you anyway, there is life after work. Even when it comes to occasionally swanning out of the office at 4 p.m. because it’s your child’s Sports Day, and there’s no way you’re going to stay chained to your desk on that day…… After all, there will always be many more working days on the calendar but only that one chance to be there with your child on that special day.
Be prepared to give (up) a little. While a healthy stance on working hours means taking control of your life, which is bound to make you feel good, your should also be prepared and willing to accept some limitations on opportunities and accomplishments. You may have to forgo an exciting new project, or even have to accept that your rise up the ladder is likely to be steady rather than meteoric. You’ve got to be sure that this is the way you choose to live your life otherwise you’re going to end up feeling conflicted.
