By , Mercedes De Luca
Published August 30, 2016
As I write this, I’m preparing to head out on vacation with my husband. We’re taking a road trip to Mendocino, and I can’t wait to see the art galleries, commune with the majestic redwood trees and walk through the quaint town. It would be easy to fit my laptop into the trunk alongside my weekender and books to read, but I won’t. When I log off the evening before my vacation starts, I will stay logged off for a full week. Unfortunately, mine is an unusual experience for American knowledge workers, but it shouldn’t be.
If your employees operated heavy machinery or worked in potentially dangerous conditions, you’d adhere to rigorous policies, protections and regulations to ensure everyone stay focused and safe. But there are few comparable guidelines for knowledge workers. If your team is regularly clocking 10, 11 or 12-hour days, how do you get them to protect their machinery - their brains? How do you get them to pull back, rest and recharge?
Maybe you wonder why you’d want to do such a thing. A hardworking team is a great team, right? Well, that depends. If by hardworking you mean always working, then the answer is no.
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In the Harvard Business Review article “ The Research is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and Companies,” writer Sarah Green Carmichael cites two studies to back this up. The first, out of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, showed that managers couldn’t spot the difference between employees who were actually working 16-hour days and those who were merely claiming to. And the second, from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, found overwork leads to health problems for employees and rising costs for businesses due to absenteeism, staff churn and higher health insurance premiums.
We know staff burnout is expensive. It’s time we acknowledge we can fix this.
Whether employees are working nights, weekends or vacations because they think they should or because they believe they must, changing that behavior has to come from the top. Business owners and leaders must first acknowledge their own work can wait, and then they’ll be able to convincingly say to an employee, “your work can wait, too.”
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Here are five ways I’ve learned to do that in the past nine months, since I joined Basecamp, where this way of work is the norm:
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Teams are more productive when they feel empowered to say, “Yes, this work can wait - it can wait until tomorrow, it can wait until Monday, it can wait until I get back from vacation.” Making this the norm, however, won’t happen until more founders and executives model work-can-wait behavior themselves.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/protect-knowledge-workers-from-relentless-schedules