State of the Corporate Worker – Breathless
by Andrés T. Tapia – “Many colleagues I used to work for may be gone, but their work did not go away as they packed up their belongings and set off for their outplacement appointment,” says a layoff survivor echoing a lament heard across the corporate world.
The average American salaried employee is working more hours, taking less days of vacation, and managers are expanding their scope of responsibilities.
But there are diminishing returns to the extra hours and responsibilities. Sick days are up, job satisfaction is down, and nearly one-third say that once the economy recovers they plan on looking for a new job.
I look around me in the American workplace and I see a workforce that is perpetually in a breathless state. And not just as figure of speech, but physically agitated. We’ve always rushed to meetings but now we are rushing to and through everything. We rush to and through lunch. We rush through conference calls and cell phone texting. We rush going and coming back from break. We rush while reading emails on our Blackberries while they ring, buzz, and chirp letting us know someone else is on the line or pinging us with an instant message.
Breathless we run.
As we talk with each other we either try to pretend our devices are not continually tugging for our attention or we succumb at the insistence and interrupt ourselves in mid sentence as we glance down to That Urgent Tiny Screen to see what we could dispatch while nodding at our colleague as they try to pick up where we left off. Can we really do two things at once? “Well, maybe, by gosh, yes!… Uh, what did you just say?”
Breathless we sit.
Even bio breaks are opportunities to not let a minute go by without staying connected. An executive at a technology firm tells the story of after a few minutes of texting back and forth with a colleague both realizing they were in neighboring stalls.
Breathless we break.
And while the sprints are faster, and the number of laps to run greater, workers are either running in place or even losing ground.
In “The State of Health in the American Workforce,” a report co-authored by Ellen Galinsky and Kerstin Aumann and released this fall by the Families and Work Institute (FWI), finds that only 28% of employees today report that their overall health is “excellent,” down from 34% just six years ago. Here are some ways in which we are less healthy:
- stress levels are rising (41% of employees report experiencing three or more indicators of stress sometimes, often, or very often)
- employees’ physical health shows downward trends (21% are receiving treatment for high blood pressure and 14% are being treated for high cholesterol.)
- men’s health has been deteriorating more than women’s health
- mental health has remained stable over the past six years—but a large proportion of the
workforce show signs of clinical depression (1 in 3 employees experiences one or more symptoms of clinical depression)- sleep problems are pervasive (1 in 5 employees has trouble falling asleep very often or fairly often and 31% awaken too early and have trouble falling back to sleep, also very often or fairly often)
Statistics also show that employees are losing financial ground despite working harder — the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in September that workforce productivity in the second quarter increased 6.6 percent while the average number of paid hours employees worked fell 7.6 percent. And with over a third of companies freezing salary increases and wages actually being reduced (hourly compensation fell a little more than 1 percent), people are working harder but earning less money.
Galinsky writes, “We need to look closely at the extent to which our jobs contribute to or hinder our personal well-being. This includes not only employer policies about paid sick time, vacation or health insurance, but also the very nature and design of our jobs and workplaces.” But she also has a message about employees’ responsibility as well. “It is disturbing to find, for example, that nearly half of U.S. employees (49%) have not engaged in regular physical exercise in the last 30 days, including 22% not engaging in any rigorous physical exercise.”
One silver lining for workers during the economic downturn is greater flexibility in many places about where and when work gets done with more options being made available such as telecommuting, staggered hours, and four-day weeks. Even in organizations traditionally not supportive of work-life flexibility policies, the inadvertent consequence of some intense cost management that has included reducing real estate space, is in fact greater flexibility as many workers have been asked to work from home. According to Galinsky, flexibility has increased 13 percent this year. “It’s kind of a counterbalance,” she says. “You may be working more, but you also have a bit more control.”
But breathlessness is not a sustainable state. We are already seeing some of the consequences. A less healthy workforce is not only less productive – in an economy where productivity is of supreme importance as margins get squeezed — but it is more expensive as health claims rise.
Most everyone gets we’ve got to do more with less. But there is such a thing as too much more, and too little less.
In our panting, let’s all take a deep breath and figure this out.
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I remember the good ‘ol days when I began my career as a stockbroker (1980). No cell phones, PC’s, maybe a pager if you were a doctor.
I would arrive at the office one hour before the market opened to check corporate news, review strategies, etc., but not check emails (they didn’t exist).The markets closed at 3pm CST. There might be corporate news released after the close, but when I left the office, I left the office. I didn’t take it with me (cell phone, laptop, etc didn’t exist). I would head to the club to work out, or the bar to meet friends and decompress. And I didn’t give out my home phone number to clients.
Today, it is nearly impossible to decompress, leave the office. Now I deal with guilt if I am not available by cell, checking my email on the weekend or continuing to work. I miss the good ‘ol days.