The AFR’s Lucy Kellaway has written an interesting article today calling for the re-introduction of the nine-to-five workday:
We start the daily email orgy before we get out of bed in the morning and then pass the hours till dusk in tiresome meetings and video conferences, only to continue to commune with our smartphones late into the night. Every day feels like a marathon, only by the end of it we have hardly covered any distance…
Nine-to-five has a long, splendid pedigree and used to work very well. Only in the past 15 years has it fallen out of fashion…
According to an article in the latest Harvard Business Review, managers waste more time than ever before, and yet no one bothers to do anything about it…
The catastrophe of our modern working lives is that the time available has grown from 8/7 to 24/7 (or to 17/7, allowing a bit of time for sleeping). To restrict the working day to eight hours would not mean any less got done. It would just be done with greater urgency. With limited time to waste, we’d do less unproductive emailing and go to fewer dreary meetings…
Kellaway’s article certainly highlights one of the dark sides of the internet and modern technology, namely being on-call 24 hours a day to answer work emails and queries.
Anyone that has ever been employed by a multinational company will know what Kellaway is talking about. You know, those late late night hook-ups or emails from Hong Kong, London, or the United States that are so “important” that they must be answered now, rather than at a less intrusive time, say between 8.30am and 5pm.
Such shenanigans are more likely to cause workforce burnout and drive-up rates of depression, potentially costing business significantly in the process.
The main cause is likely to be over zealous CEOs and management, who tend to be on massive salaries and work long hours themselves pushing work and high expectations down the line to lower paid employees, making some workplaces a prison.
An associated problem is that many of us are now employed in so-called meaningless “bullshit jobs” that we hate – typically administrative-type jobs to which we perceive do not create value. And to add insult to injury, the rapid growth of university education is experiencing the laws of diminishing returns, and in many cases has become no more than an expensive way to signal to employers that you are smart and hard working, rather than actually equipping oneself with productivity enhancing skills.
Back in the early-1930s, renowned economist, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that technical innovations and rising productivity would mean that advanced country workers would be able to work only 15 hours and still enjoy rising living standards.
Unfortunately, modern society is moving in the opposite direction, with many people working longer hours than they should (and arguably consuming too much consumerist crap). Many would instead benefit from increased free time to spend with family or relaxing, which is the essential point of Kellaway’s article.
Of course, it would also be a lot easier for people to cut back on work if they weren’t burdened paying-off some of the world’s biggest mortgages or paying high rents.
