Healing the overwork culture

Overwork corrodes the company and personal values

We’ve already reviewed how late-night work sessions and not being able to “turn off” leads to anxiety and damages productivity. But in addition to these consequences, a culture that promotes overwork will impair the emotional and psychological competencies of your workforce. We found that employees under stress are more likely to make mistakes, have a harder time making decisions, and struggle to communicate. They’ll also ring up higher health care and absenteeism costs to the tune of 36 percent of your payroll.

 

While first and foremost a financial compliance concern, this also points to a toxic company culture that holds achievement and sales activity higher than any basic level of honesty or customer service.

 

How to heal the overwork culture

 

It’s never too late for a culture to identify where its values fall short and decide to turn them around, and that goes for a culture of overwork. If you are starting to see the consequences of workaholism and achievements within your workplace such as increasingly competitive, unethical, or questionable behavior, here are three things you can do to redirect it ;

i) Scan for power plays in leadership

It’s a universal truth that power tempts people to use it. In a Harvard Business Review article, author and psychology professor Dacher Keltner notes that “While people usually gain power through traits and actions that advance the interests of others, such as empathy, collaboration, openness, fairness, and sharing; when they start to feel powerful or enjoy a position of privilege, those qualities begin to fade.

ii) Give employees a system worth hacking

How you set up your system will determine what that hack looks like. If your company only measures success in terms of sales, cross-sells, and numbers, then those become the components of the “game.” While those tangible factors are very important to success, you can disengage the threat by including other intangible factors in how you reward and rank employees: customer satisfaction scores, repeat business or customer loyalty or living out certain values such as responsibility, honesty, or collaboration.

iii) Monitor workload and stress levels

 

Besides its impact on health and safety, burnout makes employees more susceptible to poor or unethical decision-making. That should win it a prominent place in your yearly or quarterly employee evaluations where managers can monitor the emotional state of the team and proactively support team members who have been carrying too much of the load for too long

It’s time to stop rolling our eyes at overwork and address it as the threat to success that it is. Make these work habits a part of your ongoing culture conversation to ensure that you build an environment that supports your values and leads your company’s success.

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