Found myself tapping out my thoughts on this, on LinkedIn today.
I commented:
I remember reading in the Economist that in the 1950s it was a high performance signal of managers to leave at 5pm (“I got it all done, time to go home”) and a performance concern when people were left at the office into the evening (“why are they so inefficient and slow?”).
For some reason, the status signaling flipped, during the world’s most productive and affluent era in the last thirty years. We’re beautiful creatures, us humans!
I always encourage young people to actively decide what kind of firm culture they want, and to go find it because there is still a mixed bag of attitudes as to how to get results.
There are plenty of days when “best laid plans” are scuppered, and we have to crank out extra hours, or we’re working to deadline.
But, if the overwork-thing is continuous, isn’t it either poor direction of capital and resource, the firm being cash-strapped (tread carefully), poor boundary-setting (probably the common issue here), or straight-up “chest-beating” in a workaholic culture?
David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried write nicely on this topic – and their 40-hour a week Jeff Bezos-backed software firm, Basecamp, is a testament to the truism that you design your own business environment as a manager.
More here on REWORK.
