This is From The Balance Beam

[TheBalanceBeam] - Give Yourself a Break

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THE BALANCE BEAM
Ideas and Inspiration for Creating a Life that Works
Vol. 3 No. 12, June 11, 2001
Published by Success Builders, Inc.
http://www.SuccessBuildersInc.com
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"He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened."
Lao-tzu
In this issue: GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK
====================================================================== Dear Friends:
Are you working too much? In this issue of The Balance Beam, we explore the relationship between hours on the job and success. It's not as straightforward as some people might think!

If you are interested in reading earlier editions of The Balance Beam, you can easily retrieve them by clicking on http://www.successbuildersinc.com/newsletter.html and going to the Archives section. If you are not yet a regular subscriber to The Balance Beam, you can also enter your subscription information at this location.
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Today's Topic: GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK

This being the season of both summer vacations and massive downsizing, the issue of workload has been on my mind. So let's begin by exposing one big elephant in the living room: Corporate America is working too much. Pure and simple. Now I know there are a lot of folks out there who would challenge me on this with counterpoints like "we're working harder but not smarter," or those who might say that this generation has it easy and doesn't even know what hard work is all about. And I genuinely understand what political suicide it would be to march into your boss' office tomorrow and tell him that you're taking a stand for yourself and you've decided to quit working so much.

Would that it were all that simple.

According to a 1998 research study by the Families and Work Institute, American employees spend an average of 44 hours a week working, and increase of 3.5 hours since 1977. You can bet that when the Institute does its next 5-year study in 2003, that figure will have significantly increased again. In addition, Americans take less vacation and holiday time than virtually any other developed country: 19 days a year compared to 42 days in Germany, for example. Comparative studies by the Economic Policy Institute reveal that Europeans take their free time much more seriously than we do, with three to five weeks of standard vacation that they wouldn't consider not taking.

My own unscientific research is skewed farther yet from the statistics above. Most of my clients tell me that they regularly work at least one if not two days over the weekend. They typically don't leave the office until 7 or 8 o'clock, and it's not unusual to see people from their project teams in the office till midnight cranking out material to meet a deadline. Worse yet, even when they do leave the office, they remain connected. Between cell phones, pagers and PDA's with instant messaging, they are constantly in contact, whether at the dinner table (if they make it) or at their son's ball game.

Somewhere along the line, we've come to equate hours invested with actual workplace value. In many corporate environments, people earn their stripes through face time. See and be seen. The last one out of the parking lot wins. The problem is, that despite the commonly held notion that the best people work long and hard, the reality doesn't always bear this out. In a recent article in Fast Company magazine, author Seth Godin states, "There is no correlation at all between success and hours worked." He goes on to say, "You don't make better decisions when you work longer hours. You don't write better code when you work longer hours. You don't create better business development deals, make better sales pitches, or invent cooler interfaces when you work longer hours either."

Now, with all due respect to Mr. Godin, I have to say that the other extreme is no better. That is, I don't see many successful entrepreneurs or CEO's working part time and hanging out at the club, at least not when they're building a business or when the economy is in a slump. But the point is, there's got to be a happy medium. The old saying, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" is true, and it shows up every single day even as we are hungering for creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.

Most of the good leaders I know acknowledge that doing more with less is overly simplistic and often impossible. They encourage their staffs to find greater efficiencies, create better processes, and develop novel ways of working differently, not just harder. The problem is, it's tough to summon up this kind of innovation when you're completely exhausted from long hours at work followed by the mad scrambling that goes on at home to make it up to the spouse and the kids. So here's the deal about what really shows up in these times of doing more with less: More hours, but less productivity, more mistakes, more stress and stress-related illnesses, more workplace injuries, more irritability and conflict, and p.s., more dissatisfied customers.

Now, suppose we chose to take a radical departure from this vicious cycle of overwork-more problems-less creativity-more pressure-more work. What if we acknowledged that people who are well rested, better balanced and who hold family and personal time as sacred could actually do better work in less time? Would we be willing to honor the staff member who elects to leave at 3:30 to go to his daughter's soccer game? Would we resist the temptation to silently label him a "slacker" despite his having delivered an astounding presentation that wowed a new client that morning?

It's high time we developed a new formula for success that's measured in something other than hours. Value-added may be a tougher metric to assess, but it's bound to be more meaningful than face time.

At the end of Seth Godin's article, he describes Lila Wallace, an executive at Reader's Digest in the 1950's, who used to walk from office to office at 4:00 PM and say to people, "It's a beautiful day. Turn off the lights and go home." Good advice. Are you willing to give yourself, and your employees, that kind of a break?
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Words to live by:

"The hours that make us happy make us wise."
- John Mansfield