Guest Column
Overwork in America
employees under the equivalent
amounts of job pressure, those who
work on vacations return to work
much less refreshed than those who
take the time off.
A final question we asked is: Who
is most likely to be overworked? It
turns out women are more likely to
be overworked than men. And it
isn’t because women have children and work a so-called second
shift when they come home. The
factor that makes the difference is
multitasking. Women multitask
at work more often than men do.
Isn’t this just the way things
are in our economy today—
employees have to work very
hard for companies to succeed
in this competitive world? Our
study tells a slightly different
story. Yes, today’s economy calls
for working hard. But it is how
we work that makes the difference between feeling overwhelmed and overworked or
not. For example:
DWIGH T CARTER
Deadlines. This study finds
that there is a difference
between the kind of pressure that
depletes or energizes employees.
Trying to set more realistic deadlines
can help.
Low-value work. Low-value work
contributes to overwork. Finding
ways to drop or change the low-value
work so that the energy employees
spend at work is more efficient.
Accessibility. Constant accessibility is linked to overwork. Work
teams can discuss how accessible
they need to be to each other outside normal work hours and set
parameters around when it is
important to contact each other and
when it isn’t. DI
Ellen Galinsky is the president and cofounder of Families and Work Institute.
What better a subject for the
Families and Work Institute
to investigate than overwork
in America! When we began to study
overwork, there wasn’t even a variable
that measured it. So we went out
to listen to employees to better
understand this phenomenon.
From these observations and a
review of research, we created a
study that we first conducted in
2001 and again in 2005. Both
were conducted through telephone interviews with nationally
representative samples of more
than 1,000 employees.
We found that overwork is
pervasive. In 2005, one in three
employees can be considered
chronically overworked; 54 percent have felt overwhelmed by
how much work they had to do
in the past month, while only 29
percent of employees said they
rarely or never feel overworked.
The more overworked
employees are, the more likely they
are to make mistakes at work, to feel
angry at their employers for expecting them to do too much, to have
higher levels of stress and poorer
health. In addition, 21 percent of
employees who experience high levels
of overwork experience one or more
symptoms of clinical depression,
compared with 8 percent who have
manageable workloads.
Interestingly, it is not just the
number of hours that employees
work that affects how overworked
they feel. Much more significant is
how employees work today.
Specifically, employees who multitask a lot are more likely to feel
overworked. In addition, employees
who spend a lot of time doing
BY ELLEN GALINSKY
things they feel are a waste of time
are more likely to be overworked—
51 percent of employees who do a
lot of work they consider a waste of
time feel very overworked versus 25
percent who don’t do a lot of
unnecessary work.
We also found that employees
who don’t take some breaks from
work are more likely to be overworked. In other words, employees
who are frequently contracted by
their employers on non-work days
or non-work hours and who work a
lot during their vacations (which
one in five do) are more likely to be
overworked. When we compared
