Have you ever been thanked for working countless hours through the night, over the weekend and during your days off?  Have you ever gotten prizes, certificates or a bonus because you “did the right thing and worked tirelessly without counting the hours”?  If so, you are in good company, but maybe working for a bad one.  Rewarding people for working themselves to death is antithetical to the current push for a healthy work environment and it needs to stop.  Now.

Every day, I hear people pontificating about work life balance and how we all need to take time off to recharge.  We hear about how great it is to take time and just think.  We are given the spiel about emotional intelligence and focus being great productivity boosters.  Then, I see at least half the recognition coming to several teams saying how awesome people are because they went against those values.  There is something very wrong with this picture.

In my workplace, you will never hear an executive tell people they should be working more than the standard policy work week.  We know there will be peak periods where we will have to put in more hours, but that should be followed by commensurate time off, which is not only a legal requirement, but is the right thing to do for your staff’s physical and mental health.  But, what happens when it is all peaks and no valleys?  How many weekends and nights do we have to work before we have legitimate burn out cases?  What is “normal” workload?

In a discussion with a leader I know and respect, she accurately said that part of the problem is driven from the bottom up.  Individual workers feel and perpetuate a culture of having to work the extra hours to be successful.  Projects need to deliver on time and everything needs to run perfectly out of the gate.  If you work in software development, you know that nothing is ever perfect and the unknowns pop up pretty consistently.  We always talk about how the best laid plans go awry, but we never learn our lesson that the stuff we don’t know about is what will trip us up.  We adopt new ways of doing things, like Agile and Scrum, and then we ignore some of the fundamentals in favor of delivering every requirement without deviating from a schedule planned with inordinate amounts of uncertainty.  All of this contributing to a culture where failure is not tolerated and is feared instead of embraced.  We like to say “fail fast, fail often, fail forward”, but we ignore it all when the rubber hits the road.  Often, we are even our own worst enemies.

So, all this begs the question “what should I do about it”?

First, you should talk to your leader and their leader, and even their leader.  Repeat as necessary to get to the top if you have to.  If you are not comfortable doing this, I question how open your environment really is (This is not a judgement.  Mine has it’s issues too…).  It is worth it to talk about perception and reality.  We need to talk about expectations together and make them clear.  We need to ask the difficult questions about what to do when we think the product is not really ready.  We need to embrace the culture of failure as a good thing to learn and improve. We need to feel comfortable saying I don’t know, I don’t agree, I don’t think that is a good idea, I don’t have the time to do that and I don’t want to work that many hours.

As employees, we are trading our time and expertise for compensation.  If we work more hours than the agreed upon number without related compensation, we are diluting the economic value of our labor.  In a time where wage increases are harder and harder to come by and the lion’s share of the value WE are creating is being sucked up by runaway executive compensation and dividend increases, we, the workers, the creators of value, need to stand firm and demand what is rightfully ours.  We need to ask the questions and get the answers.  We need to help each other feel respected and valued.

Lastly, and most importantly, we need to get leaders to STOP RECOGNIZING OVERWORK.  They need to give the prizes to those work their regular hours and have a life outside of work.  Those who take the time be happy and balanced.  They need to give people the ability to get the job done in a reasonable time frame with the right support.  They need to give prizes to projects that deliver without working the team more than the standard work week.  They need to accept that there will be failures and support frameworks that reduce risk and manage time appropriately.  They need to encourage people to speak out against anyone or any project that goes against these principles.  And, we, as the teams doing the work, need to muster the courage to act as a team and support each other in leading balanced lives that make us happy.