The Over/Under on Overtime

Society puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of managers in the workplace. There are a thousand books you can read about how to manage people and how to get the most out of your employees. Each view on the topic is slightly different but the fundamental underpinning of all of them is that as a manager, the harder you drive your staff and the more hours they work for you the better. If employees end up working 50 to 60 hours a week, it’s cause for celebration and adulation among the management staff.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that whenever employees work overtime it’s a sign of absolute failure. Your employees almost never work overtime because of something they did wrong. In the cases when they do screw up and consistently end up working overtime, they’re just not a good fit for the work they’re doing in the first place. Most typically when employees find themselves at their desk beyond the usual 40 hour workweek it’s because someone above them screwed up. Too much work was scheduled or the company was just too focused on revenue to hire appropriate staff for the workload or some other employee just isn’t doing their job in the first place. All of these lead to staff that resort to after-hours heroics to get their work done. So to the managers of the world, when a single employee submits timesheets for 50+ hours a week, it’s a sign that you need to take a serious look at them. When your whole staff submits timesheets for 50+ hours a week, you need to take a serious look at yourself. When you find yourself actually asking your staff to work overtime every week, you need to take a serious look at your whole company.

What is underappreciated about this situation is that it’s not really in the company’s best interest to have employees working overtime. Even in the situation in which it’s not something you have to pay for directly, it is something you will eventually have to deal with. Employees who work overtime to compensate for the failure of others are your best workers. They really care about their jobs and the work they do and most importantly, they really care about your company. These are the people that great companies are built around. When you consistently demand more from them week after week, you only hasten the time when these key individuals are going to take their resolve and dedication somewhere else. The costs of replacing a good employee are astronomical. In some cases, it’s just plain impossible and when it happens your company might never be the same.

Further, when employees work overtime it’s not just their tenure with the company that suffers. If your staff is forced to work longer hours you can bet that it’s not the most efficient work they’re doing. When a person realizes that they’re “stuck at work” for 50 hours a week it’s likely that an increasing percentage of that time is just lost to the ether of water cooler banter and other random distractions. An employee who knows they can put in their 8 hours in a day and then go home to her family is more likely to be focused on her work and actually produce better output. Not to mention, when the time comes that you have to ask for more hours because a big project is due, they’ll look at it as a novelty and put more energy into it than they would have if they’d been forced to work overtime every single week. When overtime becomes the norm, then work is reduced to a mindless grind. Employees come in, sit at their desks and grind through their jobs in an almost Zen state. Innovation in this environment is almost nil. There’s no reason to do things better or more efficiently because what is most certain to greet them the next week is yet another week of too much work. In an environment in which there’s a proper balance between life and work, employees feel relaxed and free to innovate. In some technical trades especially, demanding fewer hours actually nets you more work. An employee who feels valued by his company and is allowed to work in an environment that respects his free time is more likely to contribute that free time back to the company in one form or another whether it’s thinking about the big project on the ride home or sitting down to create some new tool that will make their job easier in the future. Happy employees will naturally contribute more to your company all by themselves. If you enslave them they’ll do exactly what’s expected and then go home to complete their résumés.

Some of you out there may read this and say to yourselves that you realize all this but that you’ve got it covered. Your company, you say, has a policy. In your company, everybody’s expected to work 50 hours a week. You even tell your new hires that when they hire on so it’s expected. It’s equal for everyone so it’s OK. Unfortunately, this is a crock. Even if your company has a policy that raises the bar of expectations, the simple fact is that you can’t raise the bar for the entirety of society. Every company in the world isn’t just competing internally but is in fact in competition directly with every other company in the area for quality employees. The greater the gap between your company’s expectations of employees and those of your competitors, the greater the chance that those tried and true employees that you’ve relied on for years are going to wave the white flag and go somewhere else.

What’s saddest of all about this situation is that employees really do want to do well. They want to be appreciated for what they do and feel that they’re contributing positively to the company. When you consistently expect people to work overtime, you reduce passionate and dedicated employees who would have worked longer hours for you anyway into mere drudges who pound out the hours as a matter of required course.