Working longer hours might make you worse at your job

WORKING long hours could be making you worse at your job. So, send this to your boss and get out of the office ASAP.

WE ALL have that one friend who works long hours and tells us all about it. It’s a humble brag that can make you feel sorry for them.

Last week I was on the phone to a friend who was at work after 7PM. She sighed and said that 12 hour days were the norm at the moment.

Most of us have been there and we can all agree that working overtime sucks.

There are always going to be moments when you need to make sure work gets done. It’s when you start spending more time at work or travelling to work than you do at home or doing something you actually want to do that you have a problem.

You’re tired, you’re spending time with people you like but probably not that much and you’re thinking about the same thing.

Not terribly appealing.

It’s been an issue that has interested me for a while. So many of us feel like we are working longer and harder than ever before — for what?

A new paper from the Institute of Labour Economics looks at this issue by examining a busy call centre. The authors found that performance decreased when hours increased.

An easier way to put that is that the longer we work the less we do.

Naturally, part of this is because of fatigue, but also central to work is finding meaning in what we do. The longer we work the less we show for those efforts.

Truthfully, this is nothing new. For a few years now there has been an increasing discussion that longer hours are bad.

A Harvard Business Review article earlier this year found an inverse relationship between long hours and engagement. The authors who came from big business backgrounds said they were surprised to find that fewer hours actually lined up with engagement at work and that those of us who do longer hours tend to be less engaged.

And on top of all this, every manager knows that losing staff is costly and time consuming. The way we work is, well, pretty dumb.

In 2012 a Work Safe Australia report found that employee burnout — where we are either working long hours or squeezing too much in — could be costing the economy as much as $20 billion each year.

So yeah, when your boss asks you to work longer hours they probably aren’t making the smart decision.

The culture of business is demanding this at the moment, where so many of us are focused on deadlines and quick turn arounds.

You can tell your friends they aren’t doing as much work as they think they are when they stay late, and you can tell your boss that it is a pretty average way to run an organisation.

But they might be too busy to listen.

Conrad Liveris is a corporate adviser on workplaces and risk. Follow him on Twitter @ConradLiveris

Originally published as Working longer hours might make you worse at your job