Will Covid kill our toxic work addiction? Surely our ludicrous work-till-you-drop culture can't survive the pandemic
Benylin's mucus monster just wants you to go to bed. Credit: YouTube
I crossed the threshold of Downing Street for the first time about eight minutes before Nick Clegg. We wanted to make sure there were some friendly faces to greet him on the inside of that famous door. I’d been working 18 to 20 hours a day since the election, five days earlier, helping to negotiate and write the coalition agreement. We were all running on fumes: a heady combination of adrenalin, caffeine and novelty that kept us upright but did little to prevent unforced errors of judgement.
Later today, I’ll give evidence to Parliament’s Public Administration Committee on the operations of Number 10. It will focus on the usual controversies and challenges faced in that poky building. But as I reflect on my five years there I can’t help but conclude that the worst thing about Downing Street is its addictive power.
Politics and elections are bad enough: I was once told by a campaign organiser that blisters on my feet weren’t a reason to sit down. I should only stop delivering leaflets if they started to bleed, and only then in order to apply plasters. But once you’re working for the Prime Minister, fatigue becomes a badge of honour.
You don’t need to look far to see leaders boasting about their inhuman resilience. Margaret Thatcher claimed to only need four hours sleep. Donald Trump has done the same. When Dominic Cummings advertised for new special advisers, he made clear they’d not see their friends or daylight if they took the job. Boris Johnson claimed for two weeks he was working through his Covid symptoms, because sickness — like sleep — is for wimps. It was only once he was admitted to intensive care that they admitted someone else might need to take the tiller of government for a couple of days.
Did they learn from that? Of course not. A couple of weeks ago, minister Nadhim Zahawi was challenged on Sky News about the performance of Dido Harding, the beleaguered boss of the beleaguered test and trace system. He leapt to her defence and claimed she is working 19 hours a day, seven days a week. We can only hope he’s mistaken, because if this is true she might as well be running the place drunk.
The impact of chronic sleep deprivation on cognitive performance is profound. The scientific literature shows people think slower, and — if pressed for time — make more mistakes. Their memory gets foggier. They learn less easily. And they have “difficulty determining the scope of a problem due to changing or distracting information”, a phrase which sounds like it came from a public inquiry report into the Test and Trace shambles.
The AA estimates that up to 25% of fatal accidents are caused by motorists falling asleep at the wheel. If you’re driving an organisation, rather than a car, you’re running the same risk. “Working 19 hours a day” is a sure fire way to make yourself worse at your job. But what’s madder: doing it, or seeing someone else do it and being impressed? Zahawi clearly thought he was complimenting his fellow minister for her dedication and self-discipline. He — and most of the nation, it seems — has fallen prey to a collective delusion that working yourself to exhaustion is the way to look tough. It’s a rotten mix of machismo and masochism.
It’s not just politics. Step into the swamp of LinkedIn and you’ll find endless “hack your body” mentors instructing you to get up at 4am. This is wakefulness inflation: 20 years ago Robin Sharma created the “5am club”, advocating people get up at this ungodly hour for 20 minutes learning, 20 minutes planning, and 20 minutes exercise before anyone else woke up. But once 5am was popular, you had to be in the 4.30am club to be special. And then 4am. Soon you’ll have to get up before you go to bed in order to keep up with the business influencers.
The absurdity of this is that it’s not about what you’re achieving. It’s about showing that you’re working more than other people. You want to be the first in the office and the last to leave because it looks good. The most depressing part is that it often works to help individuals get ahead. So many bosses are rubbish at measuring performance, so they measure who’s there instead. Men end up working more hours than women, because they’re less likely to have caring responsibilities. They’re more likely to be able to put their hands up for the overtime. And that drives the gender pay gap even wider.
But if our work addiction is toxic when it comes to overtime, it’s even worse when it comes to sick leave. If you want proof of our cultish delusion, spend half an hour watching adverts for cold and flu remedies on YouTube.
You know the routine. Person feels ill. Person drinks medicine. Person gives a brilliant presentation / performs brilliantly on stage / plays enthusiastically with their children at a crowded activity centre. The message is obvious: take our pills and you can carry on with your life, regardless of how far you spread your disease by doing so. There was even a postie coughing all over the letters and parcels before he delivered them. After all, nothing says hard work like pushing disease vectors through people’s front doors.
In fact, a decade ago when Benylin launched an advert encouraging people to stay at home when sick the Federation of Small Businesses reacted with horror and disgust. “These terms make a mockery of how serious it is not to turn up to work,” said the boss of the FSB. “If people have real flu then of course they should take the day off, but if it is just a cold then they should not.”
Are they stupid? It’s completely counterproductive to tell people to come to work while infectious, even with a cold: you’ll just end up with the whole team falling ill. And yet the official representative body of small business says that’s precisely what we should do.
The work-til-you-drop culture is reflected in our ludicrous sick pay system, which only requires your employer to pay you if you’ve been off for more than three days. Even then, it’s less than £100 a week. So — unless your employer is more generous — you basically have to show up for work unless you physically can’t. Which means people trek their viruses and bacteria to work and we end up losing more — instead of fewer — days to ill health. And that’s before you even count the productivity loss of wooly-headed snifflers trying and failing to do their jobs when they should be at home with Netflix and a duvet.
If Covid-19 has taught us anything, surely it has taught us to change these rules? And change the culture that underpins them. When you’re sick, you should stay at home. When you’re tired, you should sleep. Sick people and exhausted people are bad managers, they’re bad leaders, and they’re bad colleagues.
In the early days of the pandemic, the money guru Martin Lewis was presenting a live TV show about how to manage your finances during the crisis. At one point, he had to cough. He shocked his audience by observing that it was suddenly less socially acceptable to cough on live TV public than to fart. But I’ve realised this is a social stigma we should stick with. I’m no particular fan of flatulence, but what harm does it do? It’s coughs that spread disease. We shouldn’t be shaming people for staying in bed to cough and sneeze. We should be shaming them for taking their coughs and sneezes out with them to the office, the shop, the factory, and the bus. Freedom for farts. Stigma for sneezes. It’s the way forward.
It’s been more than 200 years since Welsh mill owner and labour rights activist Robert Owen argued that what we need each day is simple: eight hours labour, eight hours recreation and eight hours rest. Those 200 years haven’t changed human nature. If you’re working more than Owen prescribed, chances are you’re not being a strong and powerful leader. You’re taking work away from others who need it and undermining your own performance.
Being at work is not a virtue in and of itself. Being productive is what matters. When we see a crisis of bad management like Test, Trace and Isolate, we shouldn’t ask why the team aren’t working harder. We should ask why they are working so much. You cannot run a marathon at a sprinter’s pace. Whether it’s senior management or a junior worker, in public services or private enterprise, we will get more from our people if we ask them for a little less.
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SubscribeIt’s not just “work-’till-you-drop”, it’s work itself that people fetishise. People pour their whole sense of self, identity and place in the world into their jobs, whether they’re working for a wage in some company or whether they’re working for themselves in a self-owned business. The word “passion” is thrown around in job advertisements and descriptions so often it’s lost all meaning.
And if you haven’t got a job, the financial impact, bad enough as it is, is seen as less demeaning than the stigma of not working. Work ends up dominating everyones’ lives even if we don’t have jobs.
There are all sorts of reasons for this insanity, from the structure of societies around economies obsessed with production and consumption, to even older cultural impositions like the Protestant work ethic. And it does seem to suit some people, the more maniacal types who could probably be diagnoses as sociopaths, the types who invariably become leaders in business, politics and other fields.
I do hate ‘passion; in job ads. Passionate people are by definition unlikely to stop and think, but instead plough on heedlessly driven by emotion. Is that what one really wants in an employee?
I’m not sure that most Brit’s need any excuse to work less hard. There are a few that really flog themselves, as there always are, but that is their choice and they help the rest of us who tend to idle about, pretending to work when actually we are chatting away by the water cooler. Or across the desks; open plan offices have lowered productivity I suspect. A period of hard work will be needed now to pay for the open-handedness of Rishi and Boris this year.
Incidentally, it is that social aspect of work that will probably mean the attractions of working from home will rapidly fade and we will all return to the office for most days.
Open plan offices were not designed with ‘productivity’ issues un mind. They were designed to increase management surveillance of individual employees. They are intolerable. They force one into to proximity to morons, who are always in management.
Well that’s the same everywhere to be honest. There are always few keen workaholics in any team, organisation etc while most are happy to get by and get paid for it. I think to be honest, this is just something employers have come to accept in that their employees won’t productive all the time, especially post probation.
Incidentally, it is that social aspect of work that will probably mean the attractions of working from home will rapidly fade and we will all return to the office for most days.
Shortly before the pandemic, I shifted to work at home. The social aspect is something I miss and that’s with the advantages of home – no commute, the ability to work without interruption, and so forth. Most of us are social creatures and that interaction cannot be replicated by remote conferencing.
Alex we seem to agree on most things but not on this. I have, essentially, been working from home for 22 years, with occasional stints of a few days or a couple of weeks in various offices. I don’t miss the ‘social interaction’ at all because, with a very few exceptions, the ad/design agencies and corporate jungles I sometimes inhabit are not hotbeds of intelligent, cultured and informed conversation.
On the plus side, working from home means no commuting and no drinks after work etc, freeing up more time for interaction with people whose interests one shares, and whose company one appreciates.
No worries. It’s personal preference. Also looks like we have some career interest in common. An early journalism career gave way to media relations and then marketing, the latter being close to where you are. I don’t design but I’ve worked (and still do) with folks who do.
Unfortunately the Covid Stasi have prevented all interaction with people whoever they are
“where” are those with shared interests? pubs,clubs,theatres,gyms etc closing down with many more to come. Next will be the subscription based clubs where people can no longer attend and thus don’t pay next years subscription and thus they close. ALL social interaction is being killed off and we are expected to work from home zombified with no human interaction. Just wait until they kill off sick pay after all you can work whilst sick from home !!!! I’m 50:50 whether this is an accidental consequence of idiotic politicians OR it really is part of a Great Reset. If it’s the latter then sorry folks things are going to get a hell of a lot worse. If it’s the former then unless things get back to normal pretty quick it will be the Great Reset by accident!
Me too, as a freelance advertising copywriter I used to enjoy going in occasionally for some laughs and a drink, but both of those things have apparently been outlawed.
As to working with a modern ‘art director’, fat chance getting one to remove their headphones long enough to get a layout pad and a pen.
In France I noticed, couldn’t fail to really, colleagues ignoring their ringing desk phone for ages. I was told it was bad form to answer too quickly as it gave the impression you weren’t busy.
The same rule applied also to emails.
I very much agree. Germany has a stay at home when sick policy which has facilitated much greater compliance when told to self isolate.
When govt forces businesses into shutting down, you won’t have to worry about this “addiction” too much, now will you. As it is, let’s not pretend the typical employ is doing much more than the minimum required to stay employed. The horrible, evil, filthy wealthy people are the ones who see 40 hours as a good start, and most folks are not wired that way. There are very, very few people driven to spend every waking moment fixated on work. And that’s okay, but let’s not pretend that the Alpha-Plus CEO is the same as the junior exec or the newbie.
I do agree with the overall messaging that if you’re ill, you should stay at home. It’ll be easier to do so in this newer age of working from home but I do worry that some unscrupulous managers and employers will take advantage of it. With me for example, whenever I get a cold, I usually have one day where I am just not able to really do anything and what I need is rest and hot drinks. The day before and day after, I’ll probably have snivels but can manage in any case. I just worry that an employer will know you’re at home and expect you to do work when you won’t anyway because when you’re ill, oddly, you aren’t productive and have little to no energy for it.
Well happily for the author government policy has cured millions of people of the addiction to work by the simple expedient of destroying their job
The pareto principle has impact in the workplace. The 20%.more competent individuals do 80% of the important work. But they couldn’t do 100%. That’s life.
The reality is that people are different.
At one extreme some can function on a small amount of sleep, at the other end some people need a lot, the rest are somewhere in between.
Obviously, those that need a small amount can work for longer hours than those who need a lot.
Generally speaking the people who can work longer hours rise to the top of their field, whilst those at the other end rarely rise to the top.
It is just that people are different – one cannot legislate to change that.
When I was young I could sleep 12 hours with ease. Now at 60 I simply can’t sleep more than 6 hours, so I have more time to get things done. As age slows you up I need those extra hours.
I don’t know who chose the picture accompanying this article, but it’s repugnantly racist, to put it mildly. Sure looks like a white man being molested by a black person with simian features to me.
I believe it’s an image from an advert for a cold/flu product. The virus represented as some kind of monkey on a back.
Not Covid 19!!!
I can’t tell if you’re serious or not – 2020 everyone…
I’m presuming you’re joking
Is this a 2020 woke joke? What’s next adverts for oranges are racist becasue they are non white. That green goblin is…..A GREEN GOBLIN Sheesh!!!!!! Oh and don’t start me on the banning of Baa Baa Black Sheep because people are too stupid to understand the original meaning.
Speaking of which, what happened to Cummings’ special new wonks? I would have expected a bunch of people chosen for their ability to think independently to have been firmly against the government’s lockdown restrictions, and yet we have heard nary a peep.
Presenteeism has been a problem for a very long time, one ex-navy chief we had as a manager would come in streaming with colds/flu and spread it around, then kick off when team members went sick, never having the sense to understand if he’d taken a few days off the rest of the team wouldn’t have needed to, in the end he was retired on medical grounds in his mid fifties totally *ucked.
As for over work, the University sector depends on it, we have ‘notional and nominal’ 35 hour working weeks, the reality is most work 45 plus hours as a minimum, and often over 75 hours a week, all overtime is unpaid and we don’t get ‘toil’, and this has continued as usual, such is life in a research department. Purely teaching academics are a rare thing, but even they are being forced to work unsustainable hours developing then delivering on-line courses.
This doesn’t paint the full picture. Women are attracted to men with status, success and who earn more than they do. Therefore the only way men can appeal to women is to work all the hours there is. Pinning this on men as though they’re not burdened is a little unfair. It’s therefore no surprise that they tend to work longer hours. With more people meeting their partners online (especially with Covid!) and dating apps now making it easier for women to hook-up/date in line with their preferences. It’s not as though this trend will diminish anytime soon is it..what incentive is there to do otherwise?
Good article. I was a Civil Servant for over 20 years and this attitude was very noticeable, especially at HQ level where you were unlikely to deal with Public on a day to day basis and often spent hours in meetings or sitting around not doing particularly much! If you worked in an Office dealing with the Public doing 7hours 12 mins a day was more than enough! Also there were the flexi time bandits who came in early, did very little before 9am and then built up a nice flexi days leave at the end of the month!
This is a big problem. Working long hours is so universal that few people question it. I can’t help think that this accounts for a lot of productivity problems, and problems with people coming up with new ideas. It seems to me that people who are tired may achieve a lot of output but they are much less capable of questioning whether they should be doing it in the first place. I think it takes a certain amount of mental energy to ask the bigger picture questions, instead of just plowing on with things.
A sleep deprived workforce is in some ways better because they are more conformist and don’t have the energy to think for themselves. The system is set up this way, but I always wonder what proportion of people actually question it. Surely people realise that they aren’t doing their best work when they wake up at 4am- it is depressing to thing this kind of life- doing long hours of sleep deprived, mediocre work is something people aspire to.
I accept that there would be uproar if we found out that Boris had a lie in every morning until 11 and clocked off at 3, but personally I can do without the repetitive press conferences and interviews. How is any of this serving the public? I feel like the major corporations and parliament operate at this low mental, seemingly productive, bandwidth, and all this makes more sense when you yourself are as overworked and sleep deprived. It’s only when you take the time to slow down that you think- what is the point of all this? It’s all a self sustaining, self serving, self congratulating system, which achieves very little of actual benefit, aside from throwing other people’s money at things.
Why doesn’t the worker stare out of the window in the morning? Because then he would have nothing to do in the afternoon.
There was always an issue with this “Work or die” vibe, from the worker’s perspective specifically. Certain people will always complain that “too many British workers are lazy” etc, but what is the motivation to run your guts out? In most companies, if you and your colleagues slave away for extra hours, do you personally get a cut of the extra revenue your work brings in? No, of course not. A person on a barely survivable hourly rate has no reason to go beyond the minimum required, except for some kind of social pressure. Particularly nowadays as hard work alone will not only not make your richer, but it won’t automatically get you promoted. You’ll still have to pass the interview.
I guarantee if some small/medium business said to staff “over this year go out and earn us 10M more revenue, and you will all earn a big cut of that money”, the majority of workers would be crawling over broken glass for it.
I’ve always felt if our ministers did a reasonable days work at their desk, 9 -6, and got some free time in the evening and normal sleep, they’d be a lot more effective
Instead they are going to bed after appearing on Newsnight and then getting up at 4 to appear on Breakfast TV to answer, or not answer, more foolish gotcha questions that don’t help anyone.