Do you work for a company in which there have been significant layoffs during the last 18 months? Are you working harder as a result? Is it taking a toll?
Productivity numbers are up. Overall, Americans are working 10 percent fewer total hours than they did before the recession, due to layoffs and shortened workdays, but we're producing nearly as many goods and services as we did back in the full employment days of 2007.
These sorts of gains are typically viewed as a good thing for companies, and therefore for the economy. It's called efficiency. Advances in technology account for many of the productivity gains over the past two decades.
In this case, fewer people are getting more done.
But is it good news? Is more, bigger, faster for longer necessarily better?
Americans already put in 350 hours a year more than our counterparts in Western Europe -- some nine weeks a year. And that doesn't include the uncounted shadow work that technology -- most of all email -- makes possible after the regular workday ends.
Here's the bigger point. Just as you'll eventually go broke if you make constant withdrawals from your bank account without offsetting deposits, you will also ultimately burn yourself out if you spend too much energy too continuously at work without sufficient renewal.
Consider this:
The average American sleeps 6 ½ hours a night -- and the costs include not just much higher rates of illness, but also significantly worse performance.
A comprehensive study by Ernst & Young showed that the longer the vacation their employees took, the better they performed. Yet more than half of all Americans now fail to take all of their vacation days and 30 per cent of Americans use less than half their allotted vacation time.
Working more than 50 hours a week has been correlated in a raft of studies with less sleep, less physical activity, higher job dissatisfaction and ultimately worse performance.
In our own work in companies, we've consistently observed that the longer and more continuously people work, the less marginal return they get from each additional hour -- and the more alienated and disengaged they become.
When I first wrote about this subject in an HBR blog last week, a number of readers fired back that the real reason for productivity gains is that recession has allowed companies to eliminate low performers.
That's almost certainly so, but is there any doubt that tens of thousands of high performers have also been laid off?
The unseen driver of high performance may well be fear. If colleagues around us are being laid off and cut back, we can't help worrying that our jobs may be next. Our survival instincts kick in, and we push ourselves harder, so we're not the next one to go.
Getting more tasks accomplished -- say, writing and responding to scores of emails in between other activities -- may technically represent higher productivity, but it doesn't necessarily mean adding greater value. Fear is a poor source of long-term fuel.
To the contrary, the ethic of more, bigger, faster ultimately generates value that is narrow, shallow and short-term.
Did Toyota do itself or its customers any good by finding a way to accelerate production and expand sales over the past decade? As its president Akio Toyoda acknowledged in a speech to his own leaders: "Some executives just got too big headed and focused too excessively on profit." What suffered was the reliability and quality of Toyota's cars -- a reputation that took years to build but only days to unravel.
Did it serve us well that bankers and brokers sold an unprecedented number of mortgages during the years of the housing boom, with minimal background checks, or that they created all kinds of new financial instruments that generated huge profits before they crashed and burned in 2008?
When you're running as fast as you can, what gets sacrificed is attention to detail and time to step back, reflect on the big picture, and truly think strategically and long-term.
If you operate at high intensity, under high pressure, for long hours, you inexorably burn down your own best resources -- your energy reservoir -- and you begin to rely instead on the physiology of fight or flight: adrenalin, noradrenalin, and cortisol. In fight or flight, the prefrontal cortex shuts down, your perspective narrows, and your primitive instincts begin to take over.
We need a better way of working. It's not about generating short-term, superficial productivity gains by using fear as a motivator and then squeezing people to their limits. Rather, it depends on recognizing that more is not always better, and that renewal, reflection, and a long-term perspective are also critical to fueling value that lasts.
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best way to work more effectively and sustainably is to find ways to intermittently renew during the day (and on weekends and over vacations).
That's what will make it possible for you to work at your best when you are working. It's also the path to sustainable productivity.
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Tony Schwartz: 'The Way We're Working Isn't Working' (POLL)
I disagree with this statement. It has been a combination of technology and division of labor. On p. 4 of his "Wealth of Nations", Adam Smith writes about the division of labor of a pin factory and how it increase the production of pins dramatically without a change in technology.
Don't buy your analysis. No doubt there's plenty of unproductive people, but we work as plenty of what you'd describe as lean, mean companies, and we see brilliant, highly focused people working in ways that burn them out. What I'm talking about is a world in which we work in alignment with our own rhythms -- which calls for a movement from long and continuous hours to periods of intense effort balance be real recovery. That's truly how you get more done in less time, sustainably -- and have a life that works.
Please watch the following video. The thesis made here it compelling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
When productivity increases, a society can benefit in one of three ways, those systems called:
1. lower prices, called "consumerism"
2. higher wages, called "socialism"
3. higher profits, called "capitalism"
In small businesses, profit goes to the owner/operator, and is really wages.
Not true for corporations. Even CEO salaries are wages. Profit goes to shareholders, i.e. the rich.
All of our productivity gain since Reagan has gone to profits, generally to the hereditary rich.
Instead of skimming through as I usually do I actually read this one...it was so on target.
This deserves the prize as the most useful and relevant HuffPo article of the month.
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Yes, maybe. But even if so, todays high performers will be tomorrows average performers and todays average performers will be tomorrows low performers. To which those readers might well belong. Not because they wouldn't be working hard, but because the goals are notched up accordingly.
And remeber, the best performer might be a machine.
Damn!
Stop the whining about how we work too hard. This is what we do as Americans. We are not the French. If Americans want to work less and get less, then let them do so on the basis of individual decisions - they can work less in high school, college and in the workplace. Or, they can work more, and smarter, and hopefully reap larger rewards.
The only ones who benefit from working harder are a small percentage at the very top. It seems the French get a great deal more for their work than we do.
Almost all increases in productivity that amount to anything are the result of technology, or do you believe that we went from 50% of the workers on farms to 2%-3% because farmers are working dozens of times harder than in 1900?
The poor without hope get guns.
The revolution is coming, and it aint gonna be pretty.
One more point: a few years back one of my acquaintances who is a project manager at Microsoft told me that his peers were always angry with him for working 8 hour days. His answer to them? Why do your French counterparts produce as much high quality work as you working 35 hours a week when you work 90?
Productivity has many faces.
And how it is squandered has many faces, too. Your post brought to mind a particular situation that I'm familiar with. A great many of our wealthier friends have indulged in second and third homes in various garden spots. As a value investor and business owner I am always bemused by the thought of all these elegant, large homes sitting abandoned for long stretches of the year and how I find it so much more gratifying that my employees enjoy full medical coverage and pension and profit sharing plans. The concept of the long term, full time employee as a value investment has virtually vanished from the scene.
In our business we have found that conscientious employees will fill a few concerted hours in the day with work and when there is no more to be accomplished they leave and if it's 3 in the afternoon, it's 3 in the afternoon. Our employees are salaried so there's no benefit to any of us to extend the work day for the false impression of accomplishment that is only an illusion. This flex time is one of the most valuable compensations we offer our employees and it is so simply accomplished I will never understand what the aversion to it is.
Purchasing power of the dollars your earn are the most important factor. Wages never keep pace with inflation. It is a natural market state for prices to fall when production becomes more efficient. Wages can, but not always, follow depending on many other factors.
Wages will not rise in this country unless 2bln people in Asia demand raises, or we build a better mouse trap.
The flaw in all of this "capitalism" thinking is that it is assumed that the private sector, by default, creates jobs/wealth etc.. This is simply not true. In fact, if corporations can go without employees and still make a profit, they are obligated to their shareholders/owners to do so. This is why capitalism is not going to solve our problems.
Building a better mouse trap sounds seductive, but even in the arenas of alternative energy, the Chinese are manufacturing more solar panels than any other country right now. Certainly this is good, however, it's not making any $ for American manufacturers.