How Companies Can End a Culture of Overwork

Jeff, a workaholic in recovery whom I met through Workaholics Anonymous, knows that his own internal demons and fears sparked his long work hours, late nights, insufficient sleep, and constant obsessing about his job. But what may have started as an internal compulsion then developed into a career-long, destructive work addiction, reinforced by the organizational cultures around him. “I had managers who complimented me on my industriousness or what they saw as my sense of duty because I was always in the office so late,” said Jeff, who, like others who spoke to me as I was reporting my new book, Over Work, asked that I use his first name only. He received kudos, even when he knew the long work hours and lack of sleep meant he wasn’t producing particularly good work. He struggled with procrastination, and his inability to set realistic timelines, schedules, and boundaries meant that he and his team often sprinted madly in a high-stress rush of late nights to complete projects. “We had a challenge with our cultural management — which was basically that presence is productivity,” Jeff said. “Measuring presence is easy. Measuring productivity is harder. And there’s so much societal pressure to overwork.” Jeff’s story illustrates what research finds: that workaholism and long work hours do not lead to more productivity or better work. “You would think if someone’s spending all this time at work, that they would be a better performer. But we actually didn’t find that in our study,” Malissa Clark, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Georgia who studies workaholism, told me. “We even found higher rates of counterproductive work, which is certainly not good for the organization.” Further, long work hours have been associated with higher rates of burnout, unnecessary errors, accidents, fuzzy thinking, presenteeism, ill health, and even shorter lifespans. There’s a financial toll as well: Stress from these hours can lead to disengagement that Gallup estimates costs $8.9 trillion in lost GDP around the globe every year. Economists like Claudia Goldin have documented how work has become “greedy” in recent decades, demanding more time and presence, fostering workaholism, and even contributing to the gender wage gap, as women and those with care responsibilities are simply unable to put in as many hours and thus aren’t rewarded or promoted at the same rate. And while the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted some aspects of work, much is still in flux, with knowledge workers in particular demanding more flexibility and control over when, where, and how they do their jobs. Organizations are at a critical juncture. Rather than double down on high-stress, greedy work that doesn’t actually produce better results, they can choose to transform workaholism- and burnout-inducing cultures into something much better for everyone. Here are five strategies that can help organizations make that change: The first and perhaps most important journey in this transformation is in the minds of the leaders who set the tone for their organizations. Managers like Jeff’s bosses need to understand the research and data and recognize that long work hours and presence do not equal excellent work. Brian Elliott, Sheela Subramanian, and Helen Kupp of Slack’s Future Forum, who coauthored How the Future Works, say leaders often get in the way of positive change, clinging to workaholic, presence-rewarding cultures because that’s what they know and how they succeeded. Many are also out of touch with their employees’ lives: The majority of senior executives are men who have had spouses or partners managing family responsibilities, whereas nearly three-fourths of those who work for them have to juggle work and care obligations. “It’s an echo chamber,” Elliott said. “I’ve had people say to me, ‘I can show our CEO that my [flexible] team was actually more productive, not just in terms of hours worked but literally in output over the past few years. And I can’t get them to listen, because instead they’re listening to their fellow CEOs and board members, who are ex-CEOs’” — all of whom rose to power in heavily male-dominated, presence-rewarding, workaholic cultures. Workaholics Anonymous laments that work addiction is the only addiction that is “both socially sanctioned and financially rewarded.” If there’s one thing that organizations can learn from the growing short-work-hours movements around the world, it’s that they are actually about designing better work processes. Shorter work hours are the by-product. Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart, four-day-workweek movement leaders, became true believers once they transformed their own trust company, Perpetual Guardian, in New Zealand. “I basically said [to employees], ‘Look, we have absolutely no idea how to deliver this. So we’re going to ask you how you’re going to do it.’” That led to intensive discussions and brainstorming that forced teams to radically change the entire system. “Our whole organization had to go through a process of understanding: ‘What are we really doing here?’” Lockhart said. “Everybody [took] a really good look at what they did in the day, what their teams did, what other teams did, and came to understand better how the business functions and makes money. A lot of miscellaneous things that don’t feed into that were dropped.” Productivity remained just as high in four days as in five. Engagement, empowerment, and loyalty levels rose as stress levels dropped. “More people said they were better able to do their job working four days rather than five,” Barnes said. “Now, that was a shock.” Many leaders see layoffs as rightsizing. Yet, without focusing on output and redesigning their work processes, layoffs can often leave fewer and fewer people with more and more work to do. Research has found that work with high job demands can often lead to long work hours, exhaustion, and workaholism. Again, the short-work-hours movement is instructive. In 2015, the Swedish city of Gothenburg piloted a six-hour-workday experiment in a public care home. Studies found that the nurses working shorter hours were happier, healthier, more engaged, and more productive — and the quality of care improved, which lowered healthcare costs. But shaving a few hours off already-understaffed nurses’ schedules meant the city had to hire more nurses rather than continue to rely, as so many countries do, on overworked, underpaid, and largely female care workers. Conservatives on Gothenburg’s city council attacked the pilots as a costly waste of taxpayer money. Yet observers found that rightsizing had long-term benefits. In reducing burnout, fewer workers quit. That saved on rehiring and retraining. And it saved on the public benefits that people out of work would have had to rely on. Similarly, in 2002, a Toyota plant in Sweden was also forced to hire additional workers when it moved to a six-hour workday. But leaders found that the cost of that additional labor was more than offset by increased productivity and sales and by the company’s greater profits. The costs of burnout, disengagement, quitting, rehiring, and retraining aren’t often reflected on balance sheets but have major long-term impacts on organizations, so rightsizing requires leaders to take the long view. Many organizations invest in individual wellness offerings, like meditation apps, in an effort to reduce stress and burnout. While certainly beneficial, these efforts don’t get to the heart of the matter: Workaholic culture is a systems problem that requires a systems solution. “Don’t give me a yoga class at noon. But do make sure that you’re not going to call me, email me, or text me after 5 PM Friday evening until Monday morning,” said Christine, another workaholic in recovery I met through Workaholics Anonymous, emphasizing the importance of setting and communicating healthy boundaries. Christine, who struggled with workaholic perfectionism, was helped most by a supportive work environment with managers who valued her talents and created structures outlining clear tasks and timelines. “They could say, ‘That’s good enough. Let it go. Move on now,’” she said. Sue, whom I also met through Workaholics Anonymous, said organizations should mandate a vacation minimum. Further, she encouraged leaders to survey the stress levels and work hours of their employees and take Workaholics Anonymous’s 20-question quiz to assess their own tendencies. “Senior staff should model a balanced life, not just tell others to do it,” she wrote me in an email. “Create a culture in which workaholism isn’t a prize but a concern.” Flexible work and supportive policies like paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, paid vacation time, and support for care responsibilities are also key to creating cultures that promote well-being rather than workaholism, argues Youngjoo Cha, a sociologist at Indiana University who studies long work hours and organizational change. But just as important as crafting the policies, Cha added, is the way organizations implement and talk about them. “If these policies focus on accommodation for women and mothers and are seen as more feminized, they may increase the stigma of flexible policies, because people associate using them with a career-limiting move,” she said. “If the policies are framed as more gender-neutral, about employee well-being — something organizations do because they care about employees — those are more effective.” Cha’s research has also found that transparency, clear communication, and guidelines are key to reducing flexibility stigma — as is making the policies a default rather than requiring employees to ask for or negotiate them. “The policies are much more effective when they rely less on manager discretion.” Some organizations have a long history of experimenting with work redesigns to promote both productivity and well-being and to prevent workaholism. Patagonia, for instance, has had a policy of locking its Ventura, California, headquarters doors at 8 PM every evening and over the weekend to discourage overworking. More recently, the pandemic forced virtually every organization to redesign overnight the way they worked. No one had a road map, which thrust everyone into necessary experimentation. For example, Blackbaud, a global software company, completely remade itself into a flexible, digital-first company by first listening to what its employees needed and then redesigning work processes and cultural expectations in tandem. “We built [the work redesign] on a premise of trust and well-being, which is key,” Maggie Driscoll, chief people and culture officer, explained to me. During the pandemic, CEO Mike Gianoni began holding 30-minute virtual sync meetings with about 200 of the company’s global leaders every Monday to share updates and answer questions. Management also instituted virtual quarterly all-hands meetings for all employees to come together. Leaders realized these online gatherings enhanced transparency and improved coordination, so they’ve kept them up, as well as encouraging more virtual work, meetings, and social events, such as wedding and baby showers. Blackbaud still believes in the effectiveness of employees gathering in person as necessary, Driscoll said, but they’re much more creative about how it happens. Workers who live in a certain region often coordinate their schedules for in-person collaboration and even volunteer days. Embracing a digital-first, flexible work culture has also enabled the company to hire and promote what Driscoll calls the “best and most inclusive” workforce. “No longer do we look at a role based on location and geography. We look at a role based on experience, skills, and execution,” she explained. “We’re everywhere now. And productivity has remained high.” Erin Kelly, who researches and directs work redesign projects as a professor of work and organization studies at MIT, has helped develop STAR (support, transform, achieve, results), a method to change workplace culture that relies on experimentation. The process starts with leaders believing that change can make work and worker well-being better, and then, like Barnes and Lockhart at Perpetual Guardian, giving teams the space and support to figure out how to make it happen. Some of the changes teams come up with are small, but Kelly has found that the process alone can be powerful. “It really signals respect for workers’ whole lives and for them having a say in how they put their days together,” she told me. . . . There’s no single solution for fixing overwork. Public policy can go a long way in either advancing or alleviating workaholic work cultures. The United States, for instance, has no national mandate for paid time off work. Long work hours are viewed as a badge of honor. Other countries, many in Europe and Scandinavia, have prioritized family-supportive initiatives like paid family leave, paid sick days, shorter work hours, and investments in care and work-life balance. That can make it easier for companies to then adopt flexible work practices, focus on performance, and value well-rested workers. For instance, one American now working in Denmark told me that her long work hours were seen as a sign of inefficiency rather than commitment and devotion. Yet government incentives aren’t enough. Japan has some generous public policies to encourage paid vacation and paid paternity leave, yet the work culture still promotes long hours and a “work ’til you drop” style they call karoshi — or death from overwork. So the onus is on organizations to create cultures focused on smart, effective work that both improves productivity and performance and enables people to live rich, full lives.

How Companies Can End a Culture of Overwork

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