Throughout my 18-year corporate life, I would find myself staying late in the office more often than not. If I’m brutally honest with myself, I did it for two reasons – to try to stay caught up with what I felt was a massive workload, but also, to show management that I was a very hard worker. One day, a senior vice president who noticed my habitual late hours said, “If you’re staying late so often, Kathy, you’re just not prioritizing and managing your work effectively.” And boy did that make me mad.
At that time, I didn’t see myself as the problem – it was my boss and the never-ending chaos on my plate each day that was the culprit. Today, in my coaching work with emerging women leaders, one of the chief complaints I hear is, “I simply cannot balance my other life priorities with the number of hours I have to work.” It’s truly an epidemic.
To understand how we can turn this around, both in corporate and other workplaces, I caught up with Joe Staples, chief marketing officer at Workfront, a cloud-based Enterprise Work Management solution designed to help enterprise teams—from IT to marketing to company leadership—eliminate the typical chaos of work and gain greater visibility company wide. In his role, Joe focuses on helping teams eliminate the unending chaos of work that kills productivity, drains motivation and stifles creativity.
Kathy Caprino: Joe, how many Americans work overtime, and what are the key reasons for it?
Joe Staples: A recent Gallup poll found that the average American workweek, which has traditionally been 40 hours, now spans more than 47. That means each week on average we end up clocking an entire extra day of work. Salaried workers are hit the hardest, with a full 25% saying they log a grueling 60 hours per week, which equals working 12-hour days from Monday to Friday, or slightly shorter weekdays with much of the weekend also on the clock.
What makes today’s workplace successful, however, is not the total number of hours worked: instead, it’s about getting the job done. That means there are days when 10 hours are required. There are also other times with 7 hours are all that is needed. The problem is that many companies focus only on the “hours worked” component, and that’s not the best metric for productivity.
Still keeping in mind that the focus should be on the work to be accomplished, not the hours worked, this move toward working longer hours has several contributing factors.
Source: forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2015/04/30/5
