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I find the notion of retirement arcane; the idea that one day I'll stop earning and start a new set of hobbies just seems risible. Is this because (after 35, years of full-time employment) I've become addicted to work and no longer know how to exist with­out regular fixes of the stuff? The Government is always harping on about "quality of life" and how "family-friendly" its policies are, and yet all the evidence suggests that at the  highest levels of power, decisions are made by work-addicts just like myself. It is not surprising that three of Labour's top women, Tessa Jowell, Patricia Hewitt and Margaret Hodge, have written privately to the Leader of the House, Peter Hain, trying to halt a move by more than 200 MPs to revert to late-night sittings in the Commons.

In the UK we work longer hours than any other country in the EU, and the number of people working over 60 hours a week has doubled since 1992, as has the number of people regularly clocking up a working week of over 48 hours. Far from setting an example of how to combine work and a private life, ministers like John Prescott and Jack Straw (who are leading the bid to reverse the recent changes in the Commons) seem determined to exhibit all the machismo of Eighties office culture by pretending that work is something you can carry on doing until 10pm or later night after night.

The Government is determined to lure women back into employment, by providing funding for childcare, but what sort of workplace are they encouraging these mothers to return to? The way in which we carry out work has deteriorated considerably over the past 20 years, in subtle and insidious ways. MPs, who spend their time in a building open until from early morning until late at night with many subsidised restaurants and bars, a gym and a swimming pool, are just part of a growing trend where time spent in the workplace is being extended at a considerable cost to relationships andfamily life. Your boss now wants to be your social worker, therapist, fitness trainer and dietician - as long as you give the majority of your waking hours back to him (and it generally is a him).

The overwork culture is ruining our lives, examines how a situation has grown up where people say that work is dominating their lives to an unacceptable. degree, but feel powerless to  do anything about it. In a study of workers from 50 of Britain's top companies, and an astonishing 46 per cent said they felt exhausted at the end of a day's work.

The very technology that was supposed to make our work easier has turned each day into a treadmill on which we spend all our time dealing with unnecessary and irrelevant memos and e-mails. This technology makes us over-available to be written to, dictated to, communicated with. We used to sneer at how workers in America were expected to sign up to a corporate philosophy - it wasn't enough just to be good at your job, you had to be willing to declare yourself a true believer in everything your employer stood for. Now exactly the same thing has happened in the UK. The inexorable rise of the management consultant has reshaped how the workplace operates along the American model. Leaving aside all the unnecessarily time-wasting and ludicrous away-days and team-building initiatives that have permeated through every large organizaion in the land, what about the novel idea that you have to give your very best to your ob, as if it was as creative as painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

How many times do you hear work addicts chanting the mantra "I really enjoy my job, I find it so rewarding'? New Age bilge permeating the work­place. Let's be brutally frank, for most people work is simply a series of dreary clerical manoeuvres in which you have to hit endless "targets" or be shown the door. Like all brilliant comedy, the TV series The Office was far too close to the truth for comfort. Employers now ask workers to write "mission statements", and to input how best their job might be done, to form teams which take part in activities from charity work to canoeing outside office hours. Networking, once sneered at, is seen as fundamental to any kind of career structure. And it always takes place on top of the long hours you al­ready put in.

I have no problem with raising the pensionable age to 70 for men and women - as long as we acknowledge that the way we are expecting people to work cannot be sustained without burnout, in which marriages, relationships and health will all suffer After smoking and obesity, I expect the next health crisis the NHS will have to deal with will be the psychological fallout from demands inflicted by the current way of working.

Employees now realise that unless they over-perform, and everyone in power in their organizaion knows about it, they will be top of the redundancy list when recession strikes and fewer drones are needed. Your boss may offer all these gorgeous conces­sions, like cheap food and great showers in the gym, but they count for nothing when you're handed a P45.

And wouldn't it be better to be exercising your dog with your partner, or going for a walk by yourself without a screen in front of your face? Isn't one hour of silence a day preferable to three hours of Muzak in the lifts, the toilets and the canteen? Isn't trying to conduct a decent conversation with your partner preferable to the aimless babble and in-jokes of the office? How many of us can even pretend we still possess those skills after 10 hours on the job and a two-hour commute each way? Suddenly the world outside the cosy bubble of the workplace seems difficult and unpredictable. I acknowledge that I am addicted to work, but I'm also privileged because my work is enjoyable, well-paid, and I can do it from home. But I still am incapable of reducing the number of hours I do it.

You need to be brave to confront what has happened to our lives. Firstly, many of us are willing to go through all of the crap listed above because of the financial rewards. We enjoy spending our hard-earned wages, because consuming validates us and makes us feel special after all those hours trying to realise someone else's game plan. We splash out on expensive luxuries like. facials, booze, massages;' yoga and bath oil, claiming they are "essentials", pathetically trying to reward our bodies for the pain and drudgery we have put them through.

This is classic addict behaviour, bingeing on working and then bingeing on pleasure. Yesterday a woman I work with was almost in tears because her daughter had been asked to turn up at a party dressed as a dinosaur. We sat in the offices of a city media company, and she said: "It's not fair, the nanny can't speak English and where the hell can I get a bloody dinosaur outfit in EC2?" What should have been of, enjoyable diversion was seen as a time-wasting threat.

Bunting says we have lost control of time - instead of spending it, now we talk about "managing" it. For too many people, however, everything takes second place to work, and the time left for anything else, be it dinosaur costumes or walking, is too short, and we are ill-equipped mentally to enjoy it. Getting the right balance between working and playing is something we need to reconstruct. And the MPs in our family-friendly Government should be setting an example, by not working at night.

by Janet Street-Porter - June 2004

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