Overtime as a scourge of modern society

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Almost all companies are now putting pressure on employees to work more hours than specified in the contract. This pressure is masked by various euphemisms: beautiful words about the mission, personal contribution, march.

Those who show a willingness to overwork often receive rewarding courtesies from management: “Joe gave a hundred and fifty percent to help us achieve our goals: worked late, went out on weekends. He sacrificed his time for our mission."

Fortunately, I myself have never worked in a company where my aversion to overtime is disapproved. And yet I think it is inadmissible even to speak favorably of such practice. This is a symptom of problems that should not be encouraged. Under no circumstances.

At its core, the need for rework stems from problems with professionalism, prioritization and flexibility. For the most part, I will be talking about overtime work in IT companies, but the same negative impact on productivity and quality of work can be observed in any other area.

Professionalism

Professionalism is about discipline. In any case, the development of skills and competence requires discipline. The revision shows that the company approaches scheduling carelessly (and not only to it). But the main thing is that it shows the inability to enclose the work process in a clear framework and not allow it to crowd out other occupations.

The phrase "work until you drop and rest to your fullest" is associated with many a way of thinking that pushes people to overwork. The idea here is that you need not to spare yourself when you go to some goal, but when it is achieved, you can allow yourself to be pulled out to the fullest. But what if that moment never comes, what if there is simply no time to rest, because one goal will always be followed by another? If you accept overwork as the norm, this attitude will begin to generate more and more reasons to work late, so that it never comes to the second part of the quote.

A more reasonable phrase sounds like: "work at full strength, and then go home." It assumes that there is some balance between work and other aspects of our lives. Every day we come to work, do our best to do whatever is required, and then, when working hours are out, we get up and go home. What we do when the day's work is done is our concern. We have the complete freedom to leave everything related to work at work, and to manage our time ourselves.

This approach gives people back the ability to decide what is important to them. Someone might say that they just want to give priority to work, but in this case, recycling is not the best way; we'll look at some of the reasons why later. Professionalism is impossible without respect for other people's boundaries and discipline. Therefore, you cannot force people to choose between career and family, work and friends, business and entertainment. Professionals and organizations that want them to be as productive as possible must maintain this balance.

Priorities

Another area closely related to professionalism is prioritization. In the overwhelming majority of cases, when I was asked to work longer or when I watched such cases from the outside, all the fuss started with the fact that someone got confused about which of the tasks was more important. Someone, somewhere, has a problem with prioritization. The most important and urgent work was not scheduled for the most favorable time. Of course, it happens that in the process of work errors arise or circumstances change. But more often it is about the wrong priorities.

In turn, this is due to a drawdown in communication. It is necessary to ensure that in the course of work the teams give each other regular and clear feedback. Whenever this rule is violated, the risk increases that we are not doing what is most urgently needed at the moment. The reality is that if the value of something is not entirely clear, you shouldn't waste time on it. Efforts to eliminate any ambiguities helps to focus on the essentials. If we can outline what is the meaning of this or that action, most likely, there is no need to perform it at all. Erroneous priorities call into question the success of the product - we are not sure that exactly what the users want is being done.

When the value of actions is clearly defined and ranked in order of importance, it becomes easier to plan the order of work. Understanding the value makes it possible to set the right scale and build a schedule. More significant things can be raised up, and less significant things can be postponed or even thrown out of the plan. The emphasis on the importance of priorities allows us to get rid of one of the root causes of the need for recycling and return to a normal schedule.

Out of schedule

For the last fifteen years I have mainly worked as a programmer. But in between writing the code, I also did a lot of supporting computer systems for business. Sometimes these systems would break down and work off schedule to fix the problem. This is also part of the workflow - the need to sometimes reallocate working hours. But - and here we again return to the issue of professionalism - this should not translate into the fact that the employee works full time, and then on top of that wastes his personal time.

I was fortunate to have worked in companies where they didn’t mind having to reshape my schedule accordingly when unforeseen situations arose. If at two o'clock in the morning I was fixing the server, then no one expected that the next morning I would return to the office and work as usual. My day-to-day responsibilities shifted so that I could catch up on lost time and protect myself from burnout. It is important to distinguish between the kind of work adjustments that have to be made when someone needs to work off-schedule and being forced to (or even voluntarily agreeing to) overtime work.

Flexibility

The first tenet in the Agile Software Development Manifesto is: "People and interactions are more important than processes and tools." Any organization that follows an agile development methodology has its people first and foremost in mind. In order for the necessary work to be done well, you must first make sure that it is good for the people who will do it. Also among the principles that formed the basis of the manifesto is the need to maintain a pace of development that is realistic in the long term.

Recycling directly contradicts this principle. The fact that there is a need for it means that a failure has occurred in the processes. In an agile organization, overtime indicates other systemic problems. So reconsider priorities, volumes, quality, identify the problem and solve it, whatever it may be. Don't get out of this situation simply by accepting recycling as something inevitable or necessary.

One of the requirements of the Agile system is a healthy balance in the life of employees, that is, the opportunity to relax. The work will not be effective if it turns into an endless continuous process. Sooner or later, we will start giving bad results, and then we will be forced to stay at work even longer and redo what did not work the first time. Therefore, it is easier to deal with those shortcomings in the system that cause the need for processing, and then such leaps in recoil can be avoided.

Productivity

In addition to all of the above, research shows that recycling is a waste of time. The longer people regularly work overtime, the more their productivity drops. And apparently, this recession completely cancels out the quantitative increase that additional hours give. New evidence suggests that sitting in the office late into the night does about the same amount of work as usual, only at a slower pace. Overtime, as the heading of the linked article suggests, is simply useless.

Overwork is bad for productivity for a variety of reasons and is best avoided by default. Why waste time on ineffective attempts to work when you can just take a break, get a good rest and return to full combat readiness? There are no convincing arguments in favor of this practice - we just taught ourselves to perceive it as the norm. We are deluding ourselves by remaining deaf to what science and our own intuition say.

Quality

Finally, there is still a question of quality. Recycling does not promote the discipline and good practices that keep the quality of work consistently high. It is itself a way to "cut corners", and a similar attitude seeps into the process of doing overtime tasks. The very fact that we are forced to work late means that we are prevented from writing code thoughtfully and without haste.

The fact that we lose the motivation to think about what we are doing and maintain order in work, the quality of products begins to decline. We are starting to do without tests more and more often, because there seems to be nothing complicated in this part of the functionality. We arrogantly decide that we can make good products without bothering to think ahead and use the appropriate methods. Such arrogance never justifies itself: we all tend to overestimate our capabilities. Long-term quality assurance practices and work discipline are the best help in maintaining a sober view of the product. Recycling takes away from us the key ingredient in both of these things - time.

Product quality inevitably suffers when overtime becomes routine. Sometimes this does not happen right away, but as it begins to be considered an acceptable way out of the situation and is welcomed, prudent practices gradually break down and even the best developers of the company are suppressed with a responsible attitude to completing tasks. If we want to maintain quality products and a strong team, recycling should not be the norm. It never really brings the benefits that it promises, and often we don't even know what price we're paying until we get a huge bill.

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How can this problem be solved? Well, personally, I just refuse to work overtime. I don't hide my irritation when I hear someone being praised for staying up late. I defend the interests of those who do not do it themselves, whether they like it or not. In general, you should start by making it clear that recycling is a problem. The first step should be like this.

Overtime is a sign of a system problem, a signal that something has gone wrong somewhere. If someone has to work longer than the prescribed time, we must do everything to prevent similar situations in the future. Recycling should not be allowed to develop into professional burnout - and by encouraging it, this is exactly what we are moving towards. In this regard, organizations should have reinforced concrete rules.