I believe it’s called “work ethic”. Something we see a lot in older workers though certainly not exclusively.
When I was in the trade association field some years ago, I used to hate late December, knowing that we had our convention and trade show in January and that I needed to contact any number of people for logistics and implementation right at a time when everyone wanted to go home and forget about business. I hated the first three weeks of January twice as much.
As far as I’m concerned, anybody scheduling a meeting at 4 pm on any day isn’t on my nice list. But that’s a completely different issue from scheduling a meeting on Dec 22 at 10 am. Because , yeah a workday is a workday. And while I wouldn’t schedule a meeting two months ahead of time for Dec 22 ( because that might cause people who want to take that week off to avoid doing so ) what exactly is the problem with having a meeting on December 22 if all the people necessary are at work anyway?
This topic is drawing out some of my grievances with the random bs this time of year I’ve dealt with over the last couple of years. I’m going to have to work this weekend to get a software release finished on December 22, because even though the release is due December 23 we of course have to spend all of that day doing all the agile meetings AND the monthly companywide meeting. I was the one (as the youngest and most recently hired full-time engineer) who had to talk some middle managers into structuring the sprint work so we could actually release on the 23rd. I’m wondering if I should have just kept my mouth shut and let everyone else mismanage the release into having to be delayed to January.
The last straw that led me to change jobs last year was around this time of year I needed to debug with a hardware system that we only had 1 of and it was going to be in use, so different managers kept strongly suggesting that I work the weekend to do that, which would be fine by me if it was like work the weekend and then take that much time off during the week.
I don’t know if I’ve just seen this work culture by happenstance. I’ve been working at some really crappy companies that have to spend months patching up their crap, and I think there ends up being this weird psychological thing where the new year feels like a much harder deadline to people and slipping is less tolerated then.
I once worked night shift for a small company. It was Christmas Eve, and we had a small party of sorts before going home for the holiday. We were all sitting around having pizza, etc., and the company’s salesman came in and saw us not working. He got on the phone to his clients and told them we were sitting around with nothing to do, and they should send work in immediately. Of course it was all “Rush Jobs,” and we wound up working all night and into Christmas Day to get it all done.
The salesman, of course, went right home, satisfied that he’d earned some extra commission.
It wasn’t long before the bastard died.
For a lot of people, doing their work well has little or nothing to do with ‘strategy’. You’re spending a lot of your life, or at least a lot of your time this year, doing it: if you don’t care about doing it well, isn’t that a matter of saying that your time and labors are worthless?
I grant that some businesses make it really hard to keep that attitude. But whatever work the results of which I come in contact with, I’d a whole lot rather it be done by somebody who thinks the work is worth doing, than by somebody who doesn’t give a damn about it and only cares about the paycheck.
If you’re stuck with a job that you think is doing nobody any good, or worse is actively doing damage, because that’s the only way you or your dependents can eat: that happens, and it’s very much too bad, and I hope you can find your way into a line of work that you do think is worth doing. But I really don’t ‘get the attitude’ that no work at all is worth doing, and it’s all just done (or not done) for the money.
Let’s put it this way: Do you object to people doing these things in January, too? If not, why not? Surely they can wait until February, after all. And after all, nobody really wants to work right after a holiday.
And if they do these things in February, surely they could have waited until March, and so on.
Underlining mine.
In other words, you assume the rank and file have the right to goof off at work for a few days before goofing off some more on extra days off.
There are 52 identical work weeks in my world. For which you’ll be paid the usual weekly rate and in turn for which we expect 52 identical sets of output as to both quality and as to quantity. You’re welcome to arrange those days off without pay if you’d like. Or with pay on vacation if you have the days saved up.
But showing up, pretending to work, interfering with others trying to work, and getting resentful about management efforts to the contrary? Not in my world. I think the same whether my role is as a rank-and-file employee, as a manager, as a military officer, or as a small business owner.
I work in book publishing (mainly pagination for first pass and at times correcting and repaging later passes). I’ve always had my own Mac at home and buy/keep upgrade the Adobe software so I can do overtime from home [and now working from home due to COVID].
Anyway, about 15 years ago I had to do corrections and repage for a big-name celebrity on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. He wanted bound galleys for his family who were going to visit him in NYC on December 26th. And he had the marked up galleys sent to me at home Christmas Eve day. So I had to had to have it all done (and one of our proofreaders had to work Christmas afternoon). Then had to get the PDF sent to the publishers AND to the printers, who had were going to print the advance readers copies on the morning of the 26th, and had to have special delivery via a courier to the hotel he was staying at with his family.
The advanced readers copies were Christmas “gifts” for his family.
I do my job well- enough to double my salary in a 12 year time frame and triple it in 22, but I’m also not unaware that the company does not care about me. They’ll throw me to the curb the second it’s better for their bottom line, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much overtime I put in, or no matter how much I sacrificed. I’ve seen it happen too often. In fact, I’ve seen people do such a good job that they’re well rewarded, and then later get laid off because they cost too much. What kind of bullshit is that?
So as a result, I’m deeply skeptical of putting my job ahead of myself. After all, when I’m old and retired, nobody at my old company is going to care one bit, and I’m not going to care one bit about it either.
The smart play is to maximize the amount of pay you get for your work, not work extra for the same pay. That’s giving the company something for nothing. And they surely don’t give you extra pay for nothing in my experience- it’s very rare that a boss comes by at 3 pm on a Friday and says “You’ve done a good job - take off early!” It’s just as likely that they’ll schedule a meeting for 4:30-5 with the potential to run long.
Which is my point- yeah, you’re supposed to work right up to 5 on a Friday, and most people do. But it’s a supreme dick move IMO to schedule meetings at 4:30 if you so much as suspect that it might run long. People resent that shit, and it doesn’t get you anywhere at a manager. What I’m talking about is the same exact thing, only at an end of the year kind of thing. The holidays are a sort of natural break in the year when the vast majority of people take time off- many take a week or more. And it’s usually also the end of the corporate year as well. So unless there’s something vital going on, why act like some sort of two-bit corporate Scrooge and schedule deep dives and schedule deliverables for just after the holidays and all that other bullshit? All you’re going to do is alienate your workforce, confirm their suspicions that you’re a dick, and generally stress everyone out before the holidays, more than some already are.
I mean, where’s the harm in letting people’s noses off the grindstone for a few days prior to Christmas? That’s my point- I’ll do work if it’s there and it needs to be done. But a lot of what I see is a lot of people pushing to get work done before the holidays for no pertinent reason other than there’s time, and work. Which I don’t get.
A bunch of people around here would probably say that’s just fine, as you were supposed to be working.
It’s that kind of attitude that makes so many workplaces such hellholes IMO.
There needs to be compromise on all sides. I’m sensitive to needing to get stuff done, having deadlines and it being important to do your job diligently, but by that same token I’m not authorizing something like a major configuration change 48 hours before 3/4 of my staff flies home for Christmas.
It has nothing to do with work ethic and everything to do with stability. Am I expecting a lazy week? Yes. But that’s because we’re taking proper precautions when we know we’re going to have a diminished ability to respond to problems for the next two weeks.
Some offices do close down for 2 weeks. Our resource manager sent out a list of our partner firms (companies like EY or Capco) and their shutdown plans for the holidays. Plus, on top of that, our clients have their own vacation plans (big, old school companies talk big about “relentless work focus” but their people have no problem leaving at 5 or taking their vacation time). Plus many of these companies have end of year IT freezes where nothing can get updated.
EXACTLY!! For pretty much as long as I’ve been with this company (for the first year, I didn’t get any vacation time beyond the standard holidays), I’ve taken time off right after Christmas, often enough that I don’t resume work until the new year. In the weeks leading up to my break, I make an effort to ensure that anything that needs to be shipped by the end of the year is in place to do so, that as many outstanding issues as possible are resolved (or that updates have been given to the appropriate people), and that any projects I’m working on have been left at an appropriate stage of completion. It’s probably the most rigid work schedule I impose on myself at any point during the year. So yeah, it really pisses me off when someone decides at 2 PM on December 23rd that some other task has suddenly become more important than anything else I’ve been working on during the year. I’m not talking about real emergencies – those happen, especially in my field – but when, for example, someone decides after signing off a document two weeks ago that they really can’t use it due to some wording in the last part, so I have to drop everything and revise it. Delays and distractions like that put me far enough behind that I was left with a choice on my last workday of the year: complete a report that I had promised to my manager by the end of the month, or work on a drawing that my supervisor had requested out of the blue days before (despite the fact that we hadn’t received enough information to finalize the drawing).
At least my manager was happy with the report.