Whatever Happened to the Idle Rich?
03.26.21
If you haven’t seen the Goldman Sachs “Working Conditions Survey” that went viral earlier this week, here it is now. Put together by a group of beleaguered first-year analysts, the survey concluded that the stress and abuse of investment banking was worse than foster care.
Responses from former investment bankers have ranged from “Who cares? You’ll be rich and successful soon,” to “I was abused too. Get out while you’re still alive.” And then there was CEO David Solomon’s response, where he reassured them not to worry, more analysts were coming soon. “Just remember,” he added. “If we all go an extra mile for our client, even when we feel that we’re reaching our limit, it can really make a difference in our performance.”
He’s right about one thing: it really can make a difference. This advice — to go the “extra mile” when you’re already logging 105-hour weeks — flies in the face of nearly a century of science that has long demonstrated why the 8-hour workday is the most productive, most profitable schedule for employers to enact (for knowledge workers it’s even shorter: 6 hours are optimal). The labor movement was only successful in winning us the weekend — increasingly a distant memory of the past — because the bottom line supported it.
And yet, the popular “work harder” mantra does not attract much scrutiny or debate because it is, quite simply, fashionable. As early as 2007, economist Robert Frank noted a strange phenomenon: the rise of the workaholic rich. “The best-educated and biggest-earning Americans simply don’t have much time off these days,” wrote Frank. “Even when they’re sitting by the pool at their beach homes in Palm Beach and the Hamptons, they’re tapping away at their laptops and screaming into their cellphones. Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
Frank’s observations proved applicable not just to billionaires but to nearly all white-collar professionals, especially males. Since the 1970s, increased productivity stopped yielding shorter working hours, defying generations of progress. “Working hours started to rise in the United States in the 1980s, especially among salaried workers and professionals like doctors, lawyers, bankers, and academics,” writes Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a consultant in Silicon Valley and founder of The Restful Company. Today, white-collar professionals work an average of five weeks longer than in 1973, and elite American men are now the undisputed workaholics of the world. What happened?
Why Did We Abandon the Idea of Leisure?
Bank B associate: “I could not work for an organization that required me to come at 9 AM and leave at 5 PM. I want to be in control of my schedule.”
Researcher: “But you work a lot longer than 40-hour weeks.”
Banker: “Yes, but this is my choice. I decide when the work gets done.”
Why do the most privileged Americans — seemingly with an abundance of professional and financial resources at their fingertips — increasingly choose to work up to 120 hours even when there is nothing urgent to do? Is that much work truly necessary? Or did an entire generation just learn to drink some very strong Kool-Aid?
The language of “choice” seems dubious in a corporate environment that has been inadvertently designed to keep employees in the office longer. If everyone is working late and over weekends, how much of an individual choice are you really making? Even if it isn’t true, the perception that the employee chooses their work schedule is the pivotal distinguisher between work-as-status-symbol versus work-as-drudgery.
A nine-year long study of two investment banking cohorts found that employees continued working extreme hours even in the face of physical breakdowns and the emergence of embarrassing tics such as “nail biting, nose picking, or hair twirling.” Their seemingly irrational choices were influenced by a host of subliminal forces that were not immediately apparent. Chief among them was floor plan design. “Floor set-up is one of the most critical management tools,” said one bank director. “We currently are going to something like a trading floor environment. Sure, it aids communication. But it also makes people highly self-aware. We found that many have stepped up their working hours.”
The open floor plan was first widely embraced by utopian techies in the 90s who swore by its revolutionary ability to facilitate collaboration and creativity. It was then adopted by many industries, including finance, recruiting, graphic design, etc. Many subsequent studies have shown that open floor plans actually reduce face-to-face interactions by removing privacy and increasing distraction levels. Open floor plans embody Mark Zuckerberg’s claims that “privacy is no longer a social norm”: one unanticipated drawback is that they allow little room for deep thought or private contemplation.
Another design choice that feeds into long hours is the increasing number of amenities in the workplace. Free lunches, coffee, dry-cleaning, valet service, gyms, and even health services were implemented to make the office space more hospitable to the worker bee employee. Initially, these might seem like great perks, but over time they seemed to have a circuitous effect. “You don’t pay by the hour,” said one director. “If they take longer … you just habituate them to being at work and getting all their needs met there.”
In Silicon Valley, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation now operates a mobile medical facility serving the area’s twelve largest employers because employees are so reluctant to leave their workplaces. “Some patients don’t even get off their mobile devices while being examined,” said the head of PAMF’s employer health services. The result: “30-year-old engineers with 50-year-old bodies, complete with potbellies, curved spines, dulled skin tones, joint issues, reduced vitality, and elevated risks of diabetes and heart disease.”
Rise and Grind Folks, It’s Hustle Time
“Hustle culture” is another reason that Americans take pride in working 24/7. First popularized by WeWork (and we all know how that worked out), hustle culture is a slavish youth movement that rejects sleep, relationships, and health in favor of “Rise and Grind.” Instead of being viewed as antisocial workaholics, hustlers are treated as selfless heroes who sacrifice everything in the name of work. Thanks to the widespread adoption of smartphones, workaholic tendencies that might once have been curbed by the natural end of the workday are now exacerbated by 24/7 email availability.
New fuel is added to the flames whenever celebrity entrepreneurs tweet about their superhuman sleeping hours or give rhapsodic interviews about the “value of hard work.” Elon Musk is a routine offender, regularly putting out gems like, “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” (He recommends 80 hours a week, peaking at 100). Then we have female figures like Yahoo’s former CEO, Marissa Mayer, who conflates hard work with 130-hour weeks best achieved through strategic bathroom breaks, limited showers, and sleeping under her desk.
Actually, that’s not hard work, that’s unhealthy behavior. And for every Marissa Mayer or Elon Musk, there is a Charles Darwin or Thomas Jefferson, people who did change the world, and who did it in 4.5 hours of focused work a day. How we forgot that there is a calmer, more effective way of working — one that treats time like a limited, valuable resource and seeks to use it as such — is unclear. Some researchers hypothesize that the development of knowledge-intensive economies is to blame: knowledge became a product not of leisure, but of post-industrial corporations, leaving individuals to signal their own high demand through constant busyness and scarcity.
What is clear is that hustle culture and rampant workaholism are taking a toll. In organizational behaviorist Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Dying for a Paycheck, he contends that workplaces are now the fifth leading cause of death per year, accounting for 180 billion dollars in additional healthcare expenses and approximately 8% of total healthcare spending. According to the CDC, 70 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep disorders (exacerbated by smartphones), a particularly troubling development given how sensitive knowledge workers are to sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week results in the equivalent of showing up to work smashed.
“If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them,” writes one researcher. “We’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”
Where Now?
One of the biggest reasons white-collar jobs have become so stressful is that nobody measures the health risks work environments have on workers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was able to reduce physical dangers in manufacturing plants by measuring the number of falls, chemical spills, etc. because these incidents were easy to spot and record. Now that we are all tethered to a smartphone, it doesn’t seem inconceivable for workplaces to start monitoring hours worked, stress levels, time off, and overall employee health. Why not use it to reduce work for once? If Google actually wanted to reverse some of technology’s negative spillover effects, it could start sending out behavioral alerts to employees like such: “It is 1:30am on a Saturday evening. Should you really send this email right now?”
If employers actually knew how much toxic work practices cost them, they would be motivated to stop tolerating (or encouraging) overworking. Total time worked is an archaic and costly metric to measure productivity by, and yet it continues to dominate most workplaces. Surely there are more meaningful measures (efficiency, quality of work, etc.) managers could prioritize. Fifteen years ago, nobody had heard of ESG policies. Now it’s tantamount to sacrilege if you don’t have one. The same could be done for employee well-being, motivating poor actors to clean up their act and pointing employees to healthier workplace environments.
In the meantime, consider a vacation (the average American never uses almost half of their allocated vacation time). And if you still feel compelled to burn the midnight oil, try Workaholics Anonymous, where a “reformed worker will aid you back to happy idleness.”
About Colbeck: Colbeck is a strategic lender that partners with companies during periods of transition, providing creative capital solutions to meet their evolving needs. You can reach the team at inquiries@colbeck.com.
