Commentary: Why workers are seduced by the cult of ‘optimal busyness’
LYON, French republic: The consultant was on her way to a demanding client meeting when she realised she had had a miscarriage. But she did not interrupt her day. Instead, she went on to consummate the meeting at her customer's offices.
The adult female, who works at an elite professional service firm in London, was i of the professionals we interviewed as function of our recent study of the work life of highly educated professionals.
When we began our study in 2014, nosotros set out to investigate how workers in enervating jobs managed their work-life residue.
Merely soon subsequently we started the interviews, we realised we needed to revise our focus, because it became clear that our interviewees were non seeking to balance their work and private life.
Instead, we found these workers were driven by a compulsion to be busy at all times, which meant they were also willing to sacrifice their family unit lives in important means.
Equally one of our participants told the states: "You become a piffling fleck of a junkie for a deadline and work. It'southward quite hard to switch off".
While a common narrative in enquiry and the media is that people desire to tedious down their lifestyles these days, our findings reveal a strikingly different story.
The desire to work fewer hours among our interviewees was uncommon. Instead they were in pursuit of something else: "Optimal busyness".
THE QUEST FOR OPTIMAL BUSYNESS
We interviewed 81 people who work in some of the biggest consulting and law firms in London. One-half of the workers were women, half were men, and nearly all of them had at least one kid.
All of the professionals we interviewed suffered from time famine – constantly having too petty time to do what they had to do.
To deal with this problem, they were drawn toward a compelling state of busyness, one in which they felt in control of their time.
We phone call this "optimal busyness" – an bonny, accelerated temporal experience that is difficult to accomplish and maintain.
Overall, we identified 3 different kinds of experiences of busyness: Optimal busyness, excessive busyness, and placidity time.
Optimal busyness is an elating and enjoyable temporal flow in which the workers felt at their all-time and near productive.
This buzzing feeling gave them adrenaline and positive energy, which was exciting. When they were in this country, they felt goose egg could stop them, and that they could, for example, relieve a company from going bankrupt.
IS BUSYNESS A BADGE OF HONOUR?
Such an attraction toward busyness can be understood equally a kind of status symbol or badge of honour, a phenomenon that has been described in previous inquiry.
Just we found that this drive went far deeper than mere social signalling. The desired buzzing feeling was itself inherently addictive. One participant told u.s.:
"I love the intensity of information technology, usually. I get a buzz out of it, that's why I do the task that I do. I like it."
We observed the pleasurable and positive country of optimal busyness often tipped over and became excessive. In such instances, professionals' feelings of being in control of their time vanished. This is where busyness became overwhelming and sometimes depressing.
When the energising fizz of optimal busyness continued for too long without break, it became unbearable.
Connection with family was often the first casualty. One participant went on a work trip and despite promises to call her family unit in the evening failed to do so – for the entire week.
We observed a similar design in the case of quiet time – that is, when the busy work period was suddenly interrupted by downtime, or typically, a holiday period.
Is 2022 the yr when employees take back command over work amidst predictions of a great resignation wave? HR experts talk over on CNA'southward Heart of the Matter:
Tranquillity fourth dimension was experienced every bit something undesirable and meaningless. It as well caused boredom and even depression. The thought of a slower footstep at piece of work was a source of business.
I told us: "When I don't have deadlines I get bored. I'g much less productive because I like working on adrenaline."
As well as interviewing busy knowledge workers, we also spoke to some of their partners. 1 partner said: "My wife is terrible. If she wakes up to become to toilet in the middle of the dark, she checks her emails – even at 3am."
THE CONDITIONS FOR OPTIMAL BUSYNESS
On one hand, workplaces produce the weather that drive the quest for optimal busyness.
We identified a number of mechanisms that did this, including unrealistic deadlines, performance metrics, time sheets, and the working culture itself – companies and peers expected everyone to exist bachelor to work at all times via their smartphones.
The firms nosotros studied are elite institutions that hire the best university students with the highest grades. New recruits wanted to survive the impossible pressure because they knew it was the only mode to get a promotion or to become an associate in the visitor.
Busy working civilization presently absorbed them and normalised unnatural working hours.
On the other hand, we found individuals themselves were also creating the weather for optimal busyness. Some boosted their chapters to work with coffee, drugs or concrete exercise.
Others went as far as isolating themselves in a hotel room so they could work without interruptions.
A mutual strategy was for workers to remember: "This is only a short menstruation and once I am through I will relax". For most, the relaxation never happened.
A CULTURE OF OVERWORK
For decades, scholars have observed the persistence of long working hours, overwork, and time famine. These problems are ingrained in many professional piece of work contexts, not only in consulting, inspect or law firms.
Academia is some other hit example: Studies consistently prove that researchers' poor mental well-beingness is linked to increased performance expectations, competitive ethos, and meticulous metrics that produce non-end busyness.
Our research offers a new fashion of understanding this phenomenon. The quest for optimal busyness is a brutal bicycle. Notwithstanding, until recently in that location has been express research that would uncover our everyday experiences of time and how they tin have a hold of us.
The individuals we studied, albeit in an arguably farthermost context, were often unaware what was happening to them.
Perhaps it is time for us all to reflect on how and why we are so addicted to feeling decorated.
Joonas Rokka is Professeur en marketing at EMLYON Business School and Ionna Lupu is an acquaintance professor at ESSEC Business School. This commentary start appeared on The Chat.
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/workaholic-work-life-balance-employees-office-workers-hybrid-working-employment-292731
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