If The Shoe Fits: The Stupidity Of Always On
by Miki SaxonA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.
Back in the distant 1980s, when startups were valued for what they did, as opposed to the cash they raised, a founder made a casual comment that has stuck with me all these years.
He said, “There will be times when my team has to pull all-nighters, but if it happens often it is a failure of management to correctly schedule the work and set viable deadlines, as opposed to an unexpected emergency.”
Boy, has that changed. These days founders brag about their 80-120-always-on-hour-weeks and expect their team to do the same.
And they do.
It’s the new techie status symbol.
And not just in tech land.
The gig economy not only brags about it, they base their recruiting on it.
“You eat a coffee for lunch,” the [Fiverr] ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”
Doer? Or exploitee?
Or, more accurately, stupid, with a capital S.
“A culture of overwork is damaging because it turns brief binges of hard work into a long-term strategy, and, worse still, an expectation. When managers start measuring the worth of their employees according to how quickly they return emails at 3 a.m., that particular work culture is broken,” Adam Alter, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, told Business Insider in an email. (He wrote a book about how technology keeps us “always on.”)
Stupid because 80-100+ hour weeks lowers creativity and productivity, while increasing coding and other errors. Not to mention lost sales and misunderstandings.
Founders take note. Not of me, but of the research, crunch the numbers, and analyze the data.
Then think twice, send your team home and go yourself and get some sleep.
Even Uber is planning on that.
“Uber is a data-driven company, and the data shows unequivocally that when you work longer, you are not working smarter,” Uber board member Arianna Huffington told the company’s employees during an all-hands meeting last week, according to leaked audio obtained by Yahoo.
Huffington also added that employees won’t have to be “always on” and responsive to whatever is going on at the office, no matter where they are. Because “when you’re always on you’re depleted, you are distracted,” and “not as creative” as you are when you’re well-rested, Huffington also said, channeling the thesis of her new pro-sleep startup Thrive.
Image credit: HikingArtist
