LONDON - Volkswagen turns off some employees’ email 30 minutes after their shifts end. Goldman Sachs is urging junior staff to take weekends off.
The surge in corporate beneficence isn’t an indication that employers are becoming kinder and gentler: It’s about the bottom line. After years in which the ease of instant communication via email and smartphones allowed bosses to place greater and greater demands on white-collar workers, some companies are beginning to set limits, recognizing that successful employees must be able to escape from work.
“Industry is now responding,” said Cary Cooper, a professor of organizational psychology and health at Lancaster University, who said the imperative to be constantly reachable by iPhone or tablet is taking a toll on the work delivered at the office. “Employees are turning up, but they’re not delivering anything.”
After seeing colleagues lose their jobs during the recession, workers are more inclined to come in to work, even when sick, surveys show. After hours, physical presence is replaced by the next best thing - a virtual one. Many employees fear switching off, instead deciding to work on vacation, during dinner and in bed with the help of smartphones, laptops and tablet computers.
People also have more data than ever to process - regardless of whether they ask for it. Information overload cost American businesses just under $1 trillion in employee time lost to needless email and other distractions in 2010, according to Jonathan Spira, chief analyst of the New York research firm Basex.
The cost of replacing employees who leave in search of better work conditions is also a concern. A study from the Center for American Progress put the cost of turnover at just over a fifth of the employee’s salary for people making up to $75,000 a year. That goes up exponentially for top managers, with turnover costs as high as 213 percent of salary for very highly paid positions.
After worrying about trimming staff numbers during the recession, employers are focusing on how to keep those who are left from burning out.
One strategy, which Goldman Sachs has been trying, is to make people feel less at risk in their jobs. That’s not easy in most companies, much less so in investment banking, infamous for its competitive environment and grueling work hours.
To keep junior analysts from burning out in the attempt to prove their worth, the bank has decided to start hiring first-year analysts as permanent employees, instead of taking them on as contract workers. The company is also encouraging them to not work weekends.
“The goal is for our analysts to want to be here for a career,” said David Solomon, global head of investment banking at Goldman Sachs. “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”
Work conditions in banking came under scrutiny after an intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London died from an epileptic seizure that may have been brought on by fatigue. The case prompted the bank to review work conditions for junior employees.
But it isn’t just the junior staff. Recently, Hector Sants, a senior executive brought into help London-based Barclays bank overcome a costly scandal, resigned after a leave of absence because of stress and exhaustion. The chief executive officer of Lloyds Bank, Antonio Horta Osorio, took time out in 2011. The chief executive officer of AkzoNobel, a Dutch paint and coatings company, did the same last year.
“The HR people now talk about regrettable turnover. We cannot afford to lose our best people because we have fewer people,” said Cooper. “We will lose them to companies with better work/life balance, where they don’t have to work 19-hour days.”
Although technology has helped increase worker productivity over the past few decades, it has come with related costs, such as stress.
Technology, for example, is eliminating the downtime or slack that used to be built into the day - such as the time one took going to the library to do research that can now be completed online, said Edward Tenner, author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. Those minutes used to act as a buffer that prevented people from working constantly.
Although physical exhaustion in traditional enterprises was bad, conflicting mental demands can be more problematic, Tenner said, particularly in the United States, where professional workers often don’t have union contracts or the same legal overtime protection as hourly workers.
“So it’s as the Red Queen said in Through the Looking-Glass, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place,” Tenner said.
It is hard for a company to control the amount of technology used in the workplace and at home because it is so integral to modern life. Volkswagen addressed the issue in a blunt, if effective, manner - by deactivating some workers’ email accounts once their shifts ended.
Companies haven’t yet come to grips with how bad it is, Spira said. Information overload has decreased people’s ability to manage thoughts and ideas. Fixing it means changing company culture - such as the idea that dozens of people need to be cc-ed on a given email.
“Almost every organization is burying its head in the sand,” said Spira, the author of Overload!: How Too Much Information is Hazardous to Your Organization.
Business, Pages 27 on 12/25/2013