ROBIN ELY: The culture of overwork
creates a situation where people daily have to choose.
If you're going to work here, you've
got to choose between work and personal life.
For many people, that's work and family.
Because we think of that as a problem
of work/family conflict, the way that they address it
and the way many companies do is work family accommodations,
which are great.
The problem with work family accommodations
in a context in a culture, of overwork,
is that people who take them are seen as uncommitted,
and their careers or derailed.
It's like well, oh, if I want to work here and be successful,
I'm going to have to give up that part of my life.
I'm going to only have work.
I'm not going to have love.
And so we end up with these kinds of cultures of overwork
that have all sorts of negative implications,
among them that it's really hard for women to advance in them.
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Everybody has the same explanation
for why women aren't advancing.
This work requires 24/7 availability.
Women are not able to meet that requirement because
of when they have children, they're
devoted to their children.
And that's why they haven't advanced.
The narrative is it's a problem women have, not men.
Men are the workers.
Men go to work, and women stay home with the kids.
In fact, what we saw for both men and women
is a real wish to be at work and to fulfill their work ambitions
and a real wish to have a personal life, whether it's
with kids, or community, or spouses, partners.
Everybody was feeling the tension
of having to go to one side or the other
in a context that basically says if you're going to work here,
and you're going to be successful,
you need to be available 24/7.
Women are going against the cultural grain.
Men are going with it.
And they're both paying a price.
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I think the culture of overwork is a good, pithy way
to describe it because it is a culture, and it is overwork.
This is, I think, particularly true
in professional service firms.
Very often, you'll hear, well, you
have to be at the beck and call of the client.
And so that could be who knows where
the client is in the world?
And that's what forces the tension.
I think I've studied enough professional service
firms to be able to say that that imperative is a myth.
I'm not saying people don't need to work hard.
I'm not saying that there aren't sometimes points
when you might have to pull an all-nighter
and spend a weekend at the office, whatever.
But this constant, relentless 24/7 availability
is really fabricated for other purposes.
It's really serving this other function
of allowing among a group of highly
ambitious competitive people to stand out as the superstar.
So we heard stories of consultants saying we put
together these 100 slide decks.
And we've spent the entire weekend perfecting them.
I mean, 100 slides?
A client does not want 100 slides.
So why do we do it?
We do it because it's our opportunity
to prove how smart we are, how smart and analytical we are.
It has nothing to do with what the client needs.
It has nothing to do with maintaining the competitiveness
of the firm.
And in fact, there is research to suggest
that kind of overwork is actually undermining ultimately
of a firm's competitiveness because it burns people out.
There's all sorts of negative repercussions
of that kind of requirement.
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Quite frankly, as an organizational scholar,
I'm much more interested in actually
what organizations can do about this.
If they really are interested in addressing
these issues of structural inequality, say,
where in our culture do we see structural inequality
getting reproduced?
And what are the narratives?
What are the kinds of interactions people
are having with each other?
What are our policies, our norms?
And really taking a look at that.
Is this really true?
Do we really need 24/7 availability?
Is it really true that it's only women who are suffering?
And do we want to change that?