PubMed1998
While the deleterious consequences of long hours of work for individuals, families and communities have previously been documented, the assumption that long hours are necessary to get the work done, especially in a world where speed is becoming increasingly critical to corporate success, has prompted little challenge. So Leslie Perlow, an assistant professor of business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, set out to explore the necessity for the seemingly endless workdays that so many postindustrial settings require. Her study of a group of software engineers at a Fortune 500 company--identified only as the Ditto Corp--is detailed in her book, Finding Time: How Corporations, Individuals, and Families Can Benefit from New Work Practices (Cornell University Press, 1997). Perlow's research reveals a "sad and all too common tale" of workers harried by competing demands, frequent interruptions and shifting deadlines. To meet the firm's expectations, the engineers she studied sacrificed home life, focused on individual tasks to the detriment of group goals and, in many cases, eventually lost any enthusiasm they'd had for working for the company. There has been some recognition that stress and burnout may be bad for a corporation as employees become less committed, decide to leave or get fired and that this kind of turnover can hurt the firm in the longer term. But Perlow documented the additional, and quite significant, shorter-term costs to the corporation of the current way of using time at work. What she found was a "vicious time cycle:" Time pressures led to a crisis mentality, which led to "individual heroics." That is, I'll do whatever it takes to do my job--even if it means interrupting you while you try to do yours. For the engineers Perlow studied, the lack of helping, the constant interruptions and the perpetual crises--clearly illustrated by the daily log that appears on page 34--made it harder to develop products. Ultimately, they worked long hours to complete tasks they'd been too busy to do earlier because of the constant interruptions. Worse, because everyone was busy responding to crises, no one had time to prevent future crises, thus perpetuating the cycle. But as dire as the situation sometimes seemed, change was possible. The "quiet time" phase of the author's nine-month study indicated that productivity could be enhanced by structuring work time to allow the engineers intervals to work alone, uninterrupted. After this first phase, about two out of three of the 17 people involved said their productivity during quiet time was above average. Nearly as many said overall productivity was above average as well. This implies that the costs of the current way of using time exceed the benefits. The data further show that change must be collective, addressing all elements of the vicious cycle. The promising implication is that collective change could benefit everyone--corporations, individuals and families. The work process could be made more efficient and effective. At the same time, individuals could succeed at work and still have time for responsibilities outside of work; people might not have to choose so definitively between their work and their home lives. To make the necessary changes, however, will require a shift from a system that rewards individuals heroics and long hours to one that rewards individuals' contributions to their teams--without the accompanying emphasis on visible work hours. That is, there must be a shift in emphasis from individual to collective achievement. And there must be a sharing of the resulting gains in efficiency between employees and employers. In the following excerpt from her book, Perlow describes what is needed to turn a vicious time cycle into a "virtuous" one: