A recent FB conversation I read shows part of the reason. I’m in this group for people who grew up in the 1960s and '70s, and someone posted:
Well, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with punctuality in business or classroom settings. But what got to me about that thread was the high tide of virtue signalling that came in the comments.
“If your on time your already late” sic (it seems a lot of these people didn’t learn to spell despite being so punctual, presumably, at school)
“If start time is 8 and you show up at 7:45 you’re late”
“I get to work an hour early every day”
“My boss says on time is late”
“Never be the last to punch in or the first to punch out” (Yeah, I’d like to punch that clock all right.)
Also tons of GIFs varying on “oh yes!”, “YES YES YES”, and the like.
I wonder if those gung ho types got rewarded for being early, or if they got the same treatment as everyone else. I wonder if they spent time during the day doing stuff they could have done off hours. In all the years I did performance and salary reviews, I don’t recall even one instance of someone who got more money just for being there more hours.
The last place I worked, with awful corporate management, people used to stay late to finish up all the time. Then, after a few years of most people getting screwed on wages despite a good market, HR was shocked, shocked to not that there were few cars in the lot before normal start time or after normal end time.
Sometimes people normalize their hours to get the raises they were denied.
When I first saw the title, I thought, “meetings”.
I spend so much time in NATO meetings (No Action, Talk Only).
And a lot of my meetings are with people who are not at my location. So the first 5-10 minutes of the meeting is about the weather, COVID levels (not as much now), and other topics which would otherwise be part of a coffee break. And some of these meetings are every day, or 3x a week.
So I am working fewer hours. But that only means that the amount of time working is less than the time I am work, due to the number of non-productive meetings.
My management team started talking about VUCA (Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). Oddly enough, the planned training is still not ready.
a lot of it is the cotton gin effect things that are supposed to make things easier end up making conditions worse for the worker like if your job is somewhat automated youre expected to make up for it by being in meetings or other busywork that doesn’t mean much to justify being there
Those people are all full of shit. They do sound like virtue signalling workaholic assholes to me.
My feeling as well. Verified to be all the more true, especially having gotten to know these people over the years. The lone exception is this one person who got to work early because he was/is obsessed with getting a parking space closest to the door.
You have coffee breaks? I’m guessing that you’re not in the United States, from your name. Although, until maybe thirty or forty years ago it was an expected feature of working in an office, so much so that it turned up in theater plays, films, and at least one TV ad.*
At my last job, people’s work schedules were wildly staggered which meant that lunchtime, or what used to be lunchtime, was the only possible time to have meetings, and I’m sure that sort of thing has been a factor generally in the decline of the “classic” lunch break, as in being allowed to forget about work for a full hour or even 45 minutes and immerse yourself in a book or go for a walk. A big reason for the staggering of schedules was that people with young children, forced by insane house prices to live in distant suburbs, preferred the earliest possible schedules, like 06:00-15:00 or even 05:00-14:00. The lunch meeting I used to have every day was substantive and useful, but it was the “NATO” meetings at other times that constrained the schedule.
*For Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Gum: “Streehh…tch your coffee break / Top it off with Juicy Fruit Gum”
As part of our “work-life balance best practices” we ard supposed to avoid scheduling meetings between noon and 1pm.
Looking out four weeks at my calendar, I have six meetings at noon, all booked by my boss who is the Executive Sponsor of the work-life balance workgroup (which I am a part of)
We have also had the bizarre situation where she asked us at 4pm to prepare a presentation for the Board of the work-life balance improving ideas we have. The board meeting was at 9am the next day, so we worked until midnight to show how much we were doing to improve work-life balance.
I worked one summer in Manhattan, and we had coffee breaks which were controlled by when the coffee and doughnut cart showed up on our floor.
Every real place I worked had coffee stations so there was no need for a scheduled coffee break, though many days a few of us hung around the coffee machine talking.
We did have one weekly meeting at lunch time, but they brought in food (sandwiches or pizza) so it was the best attended of all of our meetings. Besides that meetings weren’t scheduled over lunch, even at Intel where if I got two hours of non-meeting time a day I was doing well.
Both of those things would have been the total content of Slide #2 of the presentation had I been writing it. With Slide #1 just being the name, time, and location of the meeting where the deck is being presented.
Most of the people on the Work-Life Balance Working Group aren’t there to improve work-life balance for anyone. They are there to make their bosses look good to their bosses’ bosses.
Sorta my point. If the Bigwigs love slide #2, you know where you stand and can plan to quit, knowing the situation is hopeless. If the Bigwigs hate Slide #2, your boss is toast and things will improve.
Either way you win. That’s how I view “win-win” scenarios.
It isn’t that I haven’t read the rest of this thread, but really it didn’t need to go beyond this statement.
The Jetson version is that there is a finite amount of goods and services that needs be produced. Do it more efficiently and the result would be working less.
Reality of course is that higher productivity per person working and per hour worked results in greater productivity for the company/nation/world.
The economic power of the United States rests on the reality that we are very productive both per person and per hour worked. See figures two and eight (all parts) here.
The case for American productivity is made in this (behind wall) Economist article.
But yes Americans work more hours than do those in other countries. Even than Japan, a country infamous for long hours. What about our culture has us doing that??
Sorry for the multi post. But while increasing wealth and income inequality is a huge problem, the United States is only behind Luxembourg, Norway, and the UAE, for median income. We mostly choose to work hard and have more stuff.
