Even 70-Hour Weeks Are No Sweat For New Breed of 'Extreme Worker'

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December 11, 2006

NEW YORK -- Climbing within America's companies now is a new type of executive, dedicated to the proposition that no amount of work is too much, that there's always more effort that could -- and should -- be made by the employee for the sake of the employer, if not in the office then at one's own computer, copier and fax machine at home.

There's a name for such world-class workaholics and it was coined by economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy, an independent research organization that advises companies.

She calls them "extreme workers."

And she exposes some of their foibles in an article in the December issue of the Harvard Business Review, titled "Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek."

Studying a lengthy list of surveys from a pool of two million high-salaried employees in the U.S., she concludes that many of them can easily be labeled "extreme."

Some signs:
* Long work weeks. Counting commuting time, more than 50% of these extremists put in over 70 hours a week on the job.

* Unending work days. Two-thirds of the people with extreme jobs say that they have to be available to serve clients and deal with their emergencies at any time of the day or night.

* Little time off. Vacations seems to be shrinking. Among the extreme-jobs crowd, 42% take 10 or fewer vacation days per year, far fewer than they are entitled to.

But wait a minute. Don't the extreme executives themselves think there is something wrong with this picture? Of course, they do.

Hewlett says that more than two-thirds of them believe that they would be physically healthier if they worked less extremely.
58% think that the intensity of their work and the absence of leisure gets in the way of strong relationships with their children;
46% think it gets in the way of good relationships with their spouses and
50% say it makes it impossible to have satisfying sex.

Moreover, the next generations of managers, the so-called Gen X and Gen Y cohorts, seem less enamored of their jobs, and less willing to pay any price for them than do the baby boomers.

Inevitably, they will start to desert their jobs in large numbers and seek other opportunities.

"Half of our extreme workers have one foot out the door," says Hewlett. "The flight risk [for the younger generation] is high. They are twice as likely to quit as are 45-year-olds."

She notes also that men and women in extreme jobs see bad things happening to their children, such as the kids eating too much junk food.

The men threaten to quit but don't. Women threaten to quit and do.
Men don't blame themselves for the extremists' problems. Women see it and feel it's all their fault.
Women feel there is a direct line between the kids' underachieving in school and the oppressive hours that Mother puts in on the job.

"If we want to hang on to our key female talent," says Hewlett, "we've got to figure out a way of designing high-impact jobs that demand, say, 45 hours a week and not 70 hours a week."

So far, corporations have not been able to do that.

But some are trying. For example, 34 major companies -- including American Express, Lehman Brothers, BP, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Time Warner and others -- have joined the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force to figure out ways to reduce the pressures on managers to perform and produce.

Either they will succeed -- or they will face rising problems of talent flight and executive burnout.