Beware the employer that provides kitchen appliances.
Julie Nagle learned this the hard way when she failed to notice the mini-refrigerators in managers’ offices until after she started her new job. Gradually, it dawned on her that they were not a sign of management’s thoughtfulness but of expectations run amok.
“We’d bring out the beer and pizza and work into the evenings,” the executive recalls. “Three weeks in, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.”
Jill Baker Altman once worked for a boss who joked, “You only have to work half a day today — the first 12 hours.”
Altman told prospective hires that office hours were 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., but she added a disclaimer: “The people who have been most successful here come in early and stay until the job is done.”
As everyone knows, some jobs never are done.
Enlightened employers judge professionals by their results rather than the hours they work. They embrace the notion that people are most effective at work when they make time for family and personal interests. But subtle and not-so-subtle pressures persist to keep tabs on who is working when, even though an always-on mobile business environment makes it harder to tell these days. And it’s not just bosses who mentally rate others on a sliding scale from slacker to workaholic.
Program manager Andy Ziehr, who works from home, is amused when he checks an instant messaging program and finds someone available at midnight. Did they forget to sign out? Are they really available or do they want to give the impression they’re working?
“People love to talk about how hard they work,” he says. “There’s just a desire to give the impression that you have so much work you can never get it all done.”
Marketing director Jessica Nelson worked for a corporation where managers sent mixed signals. “Everybody’s pagers were constantly going off but you got a negative mark in your review if you were being ‘reactive’ in managing your workload, in the hours you were working.”
In other words, nobody scored points by playing the overwork card — even if they did have too much to do.
She adopted as role models calm overachievers who managed to conceal how hard they worked. “The people that actually are the most successful are the ones you never hear say, “I’m super slammed. I can’t have lunch. I can’t even talk to you.”
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At the Chicago office of a management consulting firm during the 1990s, anyone who worked later than 7 p.m. could charge the client for dinner and a limo ride home. “Before the practice was stopped by the office manager, almost everyone — all the single people anyway — would sort of keep working until 7 p.m. and then order lavish dinners from the Pump Room and Charlie Trotter’s. It became a nightly party,” recalls executive recruiter Robert Moliski.
By contrast, the firm’s consultants felt pressured to work long hours when traveling. One consultant, eager to impress but equally intent on getting his rest, set his alarm to wake him at 3 a.m. so he could hit the send button on e-mail, giving the impression he was working really late.
People caught on, Moliski says, but “most seemed to give him some credit for his inventiveness.”
Altman, a staffing executive, is convinced that workers score more points for diligence when they work late than when they start early — a perception she resents because she is an early bird. “It seems like you get more credit for being the person who sends e-mails at midnight” than at 6:30 a.m., she says.
Ed Battle started his career as an engineer at an oil company in Canada, where a 9-to-5 culture flourished. Eager to get ahead, he worked alone in the office long after others left until his co-workers took him aside.
“I can remember being told by a couple of people I was making them look bad,” recalls Battle, chief financial officer of BridgePort Networks Inc., a Chicago-based tech start-up.
A self-confessed workaholic, he lives with his family in Phoenix on weekends and spends weekdays in Chicago, working. But he makes a habit of closing his office door when he works later than 7 p.m.
“People will stay if they see senior management staying late,” he says. “That’s not a reason to stay. A reason to stay is because you’ve got work to do.”
Architect Victor Dziekiewicz shares Battle’s predilection for long hours. “My motto is, ‘I like Friday because it means only two more working days until Monday,'” jokes Dziekiewicz, of Chicago’s DesignBridge Ltd., an architecture, interior and graphic design firm.
He is aware that not all his employees share the joke. “I have divided feelings. I do feel it is important to have that other side of your life, versus the 70- or 80-hour week that’s very common in our profession.”
He tries to lighten the office mood by making cappuccino in the morning and espresso in the afternoon. Coffee breaks foster a collegial atmosphere and “give a bit of thanks for the work,” he says.
Besides, a caffeine buzz never hurts if you need to work late.
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