It's urgent to make sense of overwork

 A rose by any other name may smell as sweet but ‘overwork’ smells much sweeter when named ‘sense of urgency’

I was playing tennis with a friend, an entrepreneur. During every changeover, he would sit down and get engrossed with his phone. After being made to wait three or four times, I asked him what was so urgent.

“On email with my sales manager in India,” he replied crisply: “I reply to every email within 20 minutes of getting it.”

“But it’s 7:30 am on a Saturday morning! 5 am in India!”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We attend to everything with a sense of urgency. I’ve instilled a 24/7 work culture.” The pride in his voice, cloying and self-righteous, overflowed into the tennis court.

By displaying a keen sense of urgency, he was not really attending to work in between tennis; he was playing tennis in between his work. 

Like him, many of us take our work with us everywhere – to the tennis court, cinema, food court, even bed. We check our emails just before sleeping and immediately on waking up (even if it’s for a midnight toilet visit). Work consumes every hour of our day, every fibre of our being. 

THE GLAMOUR OF A 24/7 CULTURE

It was not meant to be like this. In a 1930 essay, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour week 100 years later. But the workweek has only grown since then. Mr Keynes rightly prophesised the advance in technology and leaps in productivity that could render shorter working hours, but grossly underestimated mankind’s resourcefulness in grappling with the problem. “If machines do much of what we did yesterday – we’ll do other stuff today!” seems to be our defiant response to Mr Keynes.

Thirty years ago, the New York Times lamented the increase in working hours and corresponding reduction in leisure, and every passing year has featured the same story. In Oct 2019, just months before Covid-19 ravaged the world, The Guardian cited overwork as a major cause of burnout.

What drives people to work so much? It’s “their own ambitions refracted through the expectations of their employers”, suggests James Suzman in his book exploring the history of work. In a similar vein, a BBC article talks about how “Billionaire tech entrepreneurs advocate sacrificing sleep so that people can ‘change the world’”; and how, having bought the argument, we “devote ourselves to work and glamourise long-hours”.

But in recent years the glitz of overwork is being dimmed by a counter movement: work-life balance. Op-eds , TED talks, business literature and mainstream news are all exhorting people to live a more holistic life, with work occupying a part, not dominating its entirety. In this environment, it is unbecoming for chief executives to overtly demand overwork, and embarrassing for employees to wear it as a badge of honour.

A USEFUL EUPHEMISM

In typical fashion, business leaders found the answer to retain the allure of long hours – in business jargon. ‘Overwork’ sounds harsh, exhausting and degrading. ‘A sense of urgency’ sounds stylish, statesmanlike and purposeful. And when it is emblazoned on corporate walls with the inspirational image of a sprinter cutting the tape after a 100-metre dash, featured in CEO townhall addresses, and written into performance appraisals, it acquires an ethereal, spiritual, quality.

As a young executive, I was once told that, by taking two weeks to start work on an idea that our managing director had thrown our way, I had not exhibited an appropriate sense of urgency.

 “But that idea is for next year,” I said.

 “So?” My manager looked puzzled.

 “So it’s not urgent!” I said.

Shaking his head and adopting a fatherly tone, he explained how a sense of urgency could work for me, career-wise, especially if it were accompanied by fire in the belly.

“People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.” says Malcolm Gladwell. As a bestselling author – of Outliers, The Tipping Point and Blink ­– Mr Gladwell’s words carry the weight of gospel to many. But his statement, while true, is grossly misleading. He has clubbed two irrefutable traits of change agents – courage and creative thinking – with a dubious third, one that is equally exhibited by successful change agents and resounding flops. I personally know entrepreneurs who pursued ideas without merit, but pursued them with a reverberating sense of urgency – and the only transformative change they effected was a downward one of their bank balances. 

To paraphrase Mr Gladwell with a sports analogy, I could say, “Tennis players who rise to the pinnacle have immense talent, an unwavering will to win and a decent pair of tennis shoes.”

THE CORONA-SENSE OF URGENCY

Under the guise of a sense of urgency the indoctrination of excessive work into our culture was complete well before Covid-19 hit us and irrevocably changed the world we knew, taking a tragic toll on lives and livelihoods, shrinking the economy, slowing businesses, and forcing us to work from home. In its midst, one might have expected some respite in working hours (for those not in healthcare).

But the reverse happened. The corporation’s answer to slowing consumer demand, disrupted supply chains and travel cessation? Work harder! The World Economic Forum reported that Covid-19 caused up to a 40% increase working hours in some countries. At home, reported in this paper last month, one in two Singaporeans has worked more hours since the onset of Covid-19; and many have added two hours to their workday.

Working from home has actually facilitated this by obliterating the office hour constraint. Like bananas into smoothies, days blend into nights and weekdays into weekends. “When the business slows down, we go faster,” leaders seem to suggest. “And since you work in your pyjamas anyway, why stop just because it’s 8 pm? Or a balmy Sunday morning?”

But the toll of overwork is now proving worse than just stress and burnout. Recent research suggests that around three-quarters of a million people die every year due to it. So, business leaders, please stop demanding a sense of urgency from your people; in fact eliminate the phrase from your business lexicon. And do it with a genuine sense of urgency. Otherwise the next time an employee tells you, “Excessive work is killing me”, they may not be speaking figuratively.

This article first appeared in The Strait Times, Singapore, on 1^st May 2022