If you work 60+ hours a week and meet some of the characteristics like fast-paced work under tight deadlines, responsibility for profit and loss, a large amount of travel, an unpredictable flow of work, and work-related events outside business hours, you are in an “extreme job”. So says a new report by Hidden Brain Drain Taskforce (what a name!) covered in Lisa Belkin’s article here.
I think a high proportion of the IT jobs are extreme jobs. And when you become an entrepreneur you are effectively signing up for an extreme job (I’ve been there).
Extreme jobs are dangerous: “Sixty-nine percent say their extreme jobs undermine their health, 46 percent say work gets in the way of a good relationship with their spouse, and 58 percent say it gets in the way of strong relationships with their children.”
But people doing them seem to love them. The article quotes the study author saying: “They love the thrill, the meaning, the challenge, the oversized compensation packages and the brilliant colleagues.”
There is whole sub-industry that glorifies extreme jobs. ZeroCaffe blog (thanks Mukul for the tip) has a nice tongue-in-cheek effort at this. Take a look at their view of the normal and entrepreneurial lifecycle (click to see the pictures; you can guess which one is which):
Companies are responding to the need for a better work/life balance. A recent article at Trends I’m Watching blog talks about the emergence of the ROWE, “results-only work environment”, that seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The article mentions IBM, AT&T and Sun but it’s apparently Best-Buy that’s pushing the envelope…
But arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done. “This is like TiVo (TIVO ) for your work,” says the program’s co-founder, Jody Thompson. By the end of 2007, all 4,000 staffers working at corporate will be on ROWE. Starting in February, the new work environment will become an official part of Best Buy’s recruiting pitch as well as its orientation for new hires. And the company plans to take its clockless campaign to its stores–a high-stakes challenge that no company has tried before in a retail environment.
Luckily more of this is on its way: “A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that 85% of executives expect a big rise in the number of unleashed workers over the next five years. In fact, at many companies the most innovative new product may be the structure of the workplace itself.”
An extreme job does take a toll in some ways. However if one is having fun in an extreme job, everything else can be worked out.
In my opinion, a good way to go about an extreme job is this: Work hard when it is necessary. It is unlikely that there will be a need to work out of one’s skin for more than 4-6 months at a stretch. When work is light, just take a long while off to rejuvenate, take a vacation etc. I wonder why most IT companies dont do this. The Best Buy way seems great to me. Get the job done and do what you like at other times. That way one can lead a balanced life, despite being part of a high intensity work environment.
Flexi time/location is a fantastic idea.
This really helps people who experience the following:
1) Extreme schedule (60 hours/week)
2) Regret for not being able to spend more time with family and kids.
However, for others, I am not sure this could be effective across workforce or across job roles.
It may backfire in the following situations.
>> For an entry level employee - He may be an excellent programmer who can finish the job at home. But his learning goes much beyond that. He must be acquainted with professional way of doing things like attending meetings, etiquette, brainstorming etc which is hard to imbibe if he is given the option to work from home.
>> Building a Corporate culture - It hurts the efforts of the company to arrange programs to build awareness about itself to its employees. Employees prefer to skip the CEO ‘Gyan’ and don’t participate in anything other than their regular assigned job. Some companies have yoga/meditation (not compulsory of course) in the morning which employees may participate and that becomes a part of their culture. Some companies in Japan even run mandatory programs.
>> Attrition - Plenty of employees’ don’t leave their employers because they love the “feel” of the company. They feel nice to work in their company. This “Feel” could range from bright colored walls to pizza eating contests to evening football matches.
If the option to work from home is given, employees may no longer show the enthusiasm to participate in the outside job activities.
Hence, the privilege of flexi work life should be provided with discretion.
Thanks,
Arun.PC
A lot of it depends on the individual’s definition of success.
It was refereshing to see that Craigslist, which is is among the top 10 most popular Web sites by many measures, refuses to play by society’s unwritten rules.
Here is a model that we can consider for identifying “extreme jobs”.
1. Are you working in a company that has work locations distributed across the globe?
2. Alternatively are you in a project that requires you to interact with people in different timezones?
3. Are you an expert in your domain?
4. Do you need to provide expert consultation across timezones?
5. Or do you need to interact with multiple customers in different timezones?
6. Is your supervisor in a different timezone?
I guess this is a decent enough set of questions. If your answer is yes to more than one of the above questions - you are probably putting in hours way beyond what is expected and hence by definition you are in an extreme job. This probably applies to anyone who has spent at least 3-5 years in the technology industry (I think IT is too limiting especially since many of us work in companies that are defining future technological products) and has gained reasonable domain expertise.
In fact if you do not find yourself answering yes to any of the questions above then you probably need to re-examine your career situation and take some hard decisions!
In this situation I think extreme steps need to be taken to ensure people stay motivated and committed. As a quick aside in a recent employee survey work life balance and training/developmental opportunities came up as key concerns for a significant majority in my company. In this context I really like the ROWE model and I very quickly forwarded the Businessweek article to my HR manager. Let’s see how it goes.