Staff having to regularly work overtime is a sign that the workplace is not adequately resourced, for about 99% of jobs. The only actual work emergencies are literal emergency services (fighting fires, pulling people from car wrecks) or maybe a very very badly behaving celebrity's PR team. Work won't love you back. Hustle culture is such garbage
It could also a sign that a company refuses to temper client expectations. I see this a lot in law (not a lawyer, but know a lot of lawyers). Clients will make big demands on small timelines and firms will say "sure, we can do that" out of fear that telling the client no will get them to leave you for another firm that is more willing to grind their employees into the ground. It's the "customer is always right" taken to its most toxic. I don't know what the answer is for the problem, because you'd have to have a bunch of service companies coming together to put an end to it.
100% agree. I work for a company whose California employees sued for the work load that couldn't be done in 40 hours, ever. The employees prevailed, got tons of backpay, then the company moved most everyone to Arizona.
They still talk the talk of down time and self care but my part of the organization still struggles with workload.
I've mentioned this before (maybe in a Culture Study thread?) but it's relevant so I'll write about it again.
A few years ago my company was doing a big campaign about work/life balance as a response to employee satisfaction surveys. There was a lot of PR, but on the ground not a lot of real change. So during Performance Review calibration time, I asked the executive team to defend their assessments without referencing how many hours an employee puts in. It was maybe not surprising, but also SHOCKING how most managers really had no idea if their employee was doing good or bad work - only how many hours the person was putting in. High performers all had notes about working weekends or long hours or rescheduling vacation to deal with a crisis. Low performers almost across the board were described as... working a normal schedule. Leaving at 5pm every day.
Fundamentally, the company only knows how *much* you are working and could not envision that a person putting in 40-hrs a week could be... good at their job and good at managing their time.
To me this is a good example of the system doing what the system is designed to do. Agencies make money by billing hours (for the most part) so the thing that is directly compensated is time, not creativity, brilliance or results. The cognitive dissonance of a company culture bleating endlessly about creativity and inspiration while actually pushing for billable hours is a special kind of hell.
Just realized your co might not have been an agency or followed this model so maybe this is irrelevant? Still, loved your comment and how it seems like such a simple and obvious thing to point out and I can imagine how mind-blowing the idea was when it was proposed.
Haha, my company is a manufacturer, so the white collar folks being evaluated in these performance reviews are doing intellectual work, but not in a billable hours sense. They are salesmen (who should only be judged by their sales), or material planners (who should only be judged by the availability of the right materials at the right time), or product engineers (who should only be judged by the success of the products they design), or manufacturing managers (who should only be judged on the safety and productivity of their factories).
But across the board what we judge is how many hours they spent at the office - possibly because the management is so out of touch that they don't really know the difference between good and bad work?
It's ALMOST like our system don't actually care about the input. What the system actually cares about and incentivizes is 'owning' your time and controlling you. But that outlook would be silly - companies exist to make money, not control people, right? Right!?!?!?
Our economy - with its partial history of slave labor - has warped and twisted views on labor, ownership, control, property, what is valued, etc. Weird huh?
Right out of college I worked for an economic consulting firm where working nights and weekends was so expected that people would just not start on the real work until like 6 pm. They would order pizza and treat all-nighters like they were a party. One of the bosses kept a sleeping bag in the office! And this wasn't some startup, it was a major company with decades of history. As someone who really really needs sleep, I hated it so! Much! I left that company after three years, but it took me much longer to really understand how unhealthy that work culture was.
I used to work somewhere with a culture of long hours and my main takeaway looking back is that people who know they are going to work 12hrs a day no matter what are never in a hurry to get anything done. These days I have probably the same output of work product and work about 20 fewer hours per week and still find time during the workday to... read substack.
A Taylor Kay Phillips dingus newsletter on the last day of my vacation is a gift. Excellent work!
I had a low level market research job for a couple of years or if grad school and I learned a lot but the most important lesson was that my time off is valuable. Not just my vacation and sick time, but just being able to clock out at the end of every day and not have to work again until the next. Every single client project required after hours work, and I'll never ever do that shit again.
Love this! I worked for a marketing company in my 20s who would routinely say "you can have the weekend to finish this up." Um, thanks? Currently enjoying what I like to call "Part-Time Summer" at my current higher ed job. (I work 20 hours a week in June and July.) It's the greatest perk I never knew I needed!
I'm gonna take a left turn here and say that it's this culture that had me convinced for YEARS that the ex was a workaholic working in a no-days-off industry/culture. Looking back from a safe space, I now believe he was never working overtime; he had a whole other life happening. I'm putting together a ton of examples, but the most glaring was when we lived in a country where NOBODY worked 40 hours a week (always less than that), and their unions negotiated everything every year -- he "missed the bus" a lot and told me he was working late when he came home at 3:30 a.m. I know. I can see it now. But only now. Those blinders were on good and tight for many, many years.
Swap "ad agency" for "video game publisher" and this was my life in the late 90's-early 00's. I was already over it then, but at least the money was good and I wish I'd saved more of it.
A long time ago, I was a scientist and if you weren’t there 7 days a week, minimum 10 hours per day, you were not worthy. I hope you have a restful and relaxing vacay!
Great dingus offering. Years ago I taught management practices in a corporation that badly needed such teaching. The short story is that I was able to catalog a list of practices that constituted poor management - some of them by themselves and others in combinations that could become frightening. Ultimately it all boiled down to simple concepts: hire good people; make clear between you what the objectives are and when things needed to be done; let teams come together who can work together; make sure they have all the tools to get done what they need to get done; get out of the way. This did not mean you as the manager didn't participate. It just meant that you weren't the chief "doer" or the most important one. You also protected your teams from stupidity from above and from self-imposed bad habits, such as working too many hours, failing to take days and vacation time off - and from yourself. It was, of course, more than that and more complicated. It meant paying a lot of attention, doing "management by walking around," talking to people and hearing what they had to say, never mind putting out fires that people would start. But all in all, the ideas of trust and clarity were prime. Did it always work beautifully? Of course not. Humans are humans, people sometimes are not what you thought they were, and emotions can get the best of the best of us.
When I trained managers, I could only hope that they were insightful and willing to learn. Some were neither, and upon return to their normal roles, they made no changes. But others took to heart what they learned about themselves and let their innate talents blossom.
The sad thing is that I talk to people all the time - particularly my own kids - about management horror shows they live through and have to tell them that good management is a rarity because too many managers and executives didn't get into their positions because of their ability to manage people. More, it's their willingness to manage the numbers and the ephemera of optics, never mind ruthlessness. They really don't care about people or their lives.
This resonates with me so much. I worked for four decades in enterprise software, and was constantly baffled by colleagues working long hours and weekends, and quickly learned to lie about it.
On one memorable occasion, late on a Friday afternoon I received an email from my boss saying he needed a first draft of my presentation for the following week "first thing on Monday", for no real reason. I waited until six, renamed a random file to a ".ppt" extension, sent it to him, and knocked off for the weekend. On Monday around 11am I got an email from him saying that the file seemed to be "corrupted". I told him that I would need the rest of the day to "recreate it", and set about writing it.
I escaped this life 6 years ago (after 18 years) and it is the one thing I am more grateful for than anything else. Thanks for the validation, I loved this :)
Staff having to regularly work overtime is a sign that the workplace is not adequately resourced, for about 99% of jobs. The only actual work emergencies are literal emergency services (fighting fires, pulling people from car wrecks) or maybe a very very badly behaving celebrity's PR team. Work won't love you back. Hustle culture is such garbage
It could also a sign that a company refuses to temper client expectations. I see this a lot in law (not a lawyer, but know a lot of lawyers). Clients will make big demands on small timelines and firms will say "sure, we can do that" out of fear that telling the client no will get them to leave you for another firm that is more willing to grind their employees into the ground. It's the "customer is always right" taken to its most toxic. I don't know what the answer is for the problem, because you'd have to have a bunch of service companies coming together to put an end to it.
100% agree. I work for a company whose California employees sued for the work load that couldn't be done in 40 hours, ever. The employees prevailed, got tons of backpay, then the company moved most everyone to Arizona.
They still talk the talk of down time and self care but my part of the organization still struggles with workload.
I've mentioned this before (maybe in a Culture Study thread?) but it's relevant so I'll write about it again.
A few years ago my company was doing a big campaign about work/life balance as a response to employee satisfaction surveys. There was a lot of PR, but on the ground not a lot of real change. So during Performance Review calibration time, I asked the executive team to defend their assessments without referencing how many hours an employee puts in. It was maybe not surprising, but also SHOCKING how most managers really had no idea if their employee was doing good or bad work - only how many hours the person was putting in. High performers all had notes about working weekends or long hours or rescheduling vacation to deal with a crisis. Low performers almost across the board were described as... working a normal schedule. Leaving at 5pm every day.
Fundamentally, the company only knows how *much* you are working and could not envision that a person putting in 40-hrs a week could be... good at their job and good at managing their time.
To me this is a good example of the system doing what the system is designed to do. Agencies make money by billing hours (for the most part) so the thing that is directly compensated is time, not creativity, brilliance or results. The cognitive dissonance of a company culture bleating endlessly about creativity and inspiration while actually pushing for billable hours is a special kind of hell.
Just realized your co might not have been an agency or followed this model so maybe this is irrelevant? Still, loved your comment and how it seems like such a simple and obvious thing to point out and I can imagine how mind-blowing the idea was when it was proposed.
Haha, my company is a manufacturer, so the white collar folks being evaluated in these performance reviews are doing intellectual work, but not in a billable hours sense. They are salesmen (who should only be judged by their sales), or material planners (who should only be judged by the availability of the right materials at the right time), or product engineers (who should only be judged by the success of the products they design), or manufacturing managers (who should only be judged on the safety and productivity of their factories).
But across the board what we judge is how many hours they spent at the office - possibly because the management is so out of touch that they don't really know the difference between good and bad work?
It's ALMOST like our system don't actually care about the input. What the system actually cares about and incentivizes is 'owning' your time and controlling you. But that outlook would be silly - companies exist to make money, not control people, right? Right!?!?!?
This is the reason many companies don't allow WFH, even if there is nothing in the job duties that require employees to be in-person. CONTROL.
Our economy - with its partial history of slave labor - has warped and twisted views on labor, ownership, control, property, what is valued, etc. Weird huh?
I used to be a time-off skeptic. Now it's my religion.
Right out of college I worked for an economic consulting firm where working nights and weekends was so expected that people would just not start on the real work until like 6 pm. They would order pizza and treat all-nighters like they were a party. One of the bosses kept a sleeping bag in the office! And this wasn't some startup, it was a major company with decades of history. As someone who really really needs sleep, I hated it so! Much! I left that company after three years, but it took me much longer to really understand how unhealthy that work culture was.
I used to work somewhere with a culture of long hours and my main takeaway looking back is that people who know they are going to work 12hrs a day no matter what are never in a hurry to get anything done. These days I have probably the same output of work product and work about 20 fewer hours per week and still find time during the workday to... read substack.
Love this!
A Taylor Kay Phillips dingus newsletter on the last day of my vacation is a gift. Excellent work!
I had a low level market research job for a couple of years or if grad school and I learned a lot but the most important lesson was that my time off is valuable. Not just my vacation and sick time, but just being able to clock out at the end of every day and not have to work again until the next. Every single client project required after hours work, and I'll never ever do that shit again.
As an agency veteran who finally got tired of the “hustle and grind” bro culture, I co-sign every word of this.
Love this! I worked for a marketing company in my 20s who would routinely say "you can have the weekend to finish this up." Um, thanks? Currently enjoying what I like to call "Part-Time Summer" at my current higher ed job. (I work 20 hours a week in June and July.) It's the greatest perk I never knew I needed!
I'm gonna take a left turn here and say that it's this culture that had me convinced for YEARS that the ex was a workaholic working in a no-days-off industry/culture. Looking back from a safe space, I now believe he was never working overtime; he had a whole other life happening. I'm putting together a ton of examples, but the most glaring was when we lived in a country where NOBODY worked 40 hours a week (always less than that), and their unions negotiated everything every year -- he "missed the bus" a lot and told me he was working late when he came home at 3:30 a.m. I know. I can see it now. But only now. Those blinders were on good and tight for many, many years.
Swap "ad agency" for "video game publisher" and this was my life in the late 90's-early 00's. I was already over it then, but at least the money was good and I wish I'd saved more of it.
A long time ago, I was a scientist and if you weren’t there 7 days a week, minimum 10 hours per day, you were not worthy. I hope you have a restful and relaxing vacay!
Great dingus offering. Years ago I taught management practices in a corporation that badly needed such teaching. The short story is that I was able to catalog a list of practices that constituted poor management - some of them by themselves and others in combinations that could become frightening. Ultimately it all boiled down to simple concepts: hire good people; make clear between you what the objectives are and when things needed to be done; let teams come together who can work together; make sure they have all the tools to get done what they need to get done; get out of the way. This did not mean you as the manager didn't participate. It just meant that you weren't the chief "doer" or the most important one. You also protected your teams from stupidity from above and from self-imposed bad habits, such as working too many hours, failing to take days and vacation time off - and from yourself. It was, of course, more than that and more complicated. It meant paying a lot of attention, doing "management by walking around," talking to people and hearing what they had to say, never mind putting out fires that people would start. But all in all, the ideas of trust and clarity were prime. Did it always work beautifully? Of course not. Humans are humans, people sometimes are not what you thought they were, and emotions can get the best of the best of us.
When I trained managers, I could only hope that they were insightful and willing to learn. Some were neither, and upon return to their normal roles, they made no changes. But others took to heart what they learned about themselves and let their innate talents blossom.
The sad thing is that I talk to people all the time - particularly my own kids - about management horror shows they live through and have to tell them that good management is a rarity because too many managers and executives didn't get into their positions because of their ability to manage people. More, it's their willingness to manage the numbers and the ephemera of optics, never mind ruthlessness. They really don't care about people or their lives.
This resonates with me so much. I worked for four decades in enterprise software, and was constantly baffled by colleagues working long hours and weekends, and quickly learned to lie about it.
On one memorable occasion, late on a Friday afternoon I received an email from my boss saying he needed a first draft of my presentation for the following week "first thing on Monday", for no real reason. I waited until six, renamed a random file to a ".ppt" extension, sent it to him, and knocked off for the weekend. On Monday around 11am I got an email from him saying that the file seemed to be "corrupted". I told him that I would need the rest of the day to "recreate it", and set about writing it.
You made AARPs best books of the year so far!
Sorry. Lyz did.
I escaped this life 6 years ago (after 18 years) and it is the one thing I am more grateful for than anything else. Thanks for the validation, I loved this :)