Wall Street investment banks have found the key to getting employees to work longer and harder: Give them the power to set their own hours and time off.
Highly educated employees given autonomy over their own schedules end up working harder because they want to prove who can put in the most time at the office, University of Pennsylvania professor Alexandra Michel found after spending 12 years studying the work habits of young executives at two large investment banks. Bankers, software engineers, and lawyers – so-called knowledge-based workers – often work more than 100 hours per week to the detriment of their health, even when nothing urgent demands their attention, she says.
When employees feel they are required to work more, it motivates them to work less. When given more power to set their own pace, young bankers choose to work longer hours, take less vacation time, and sacrifice personal needs, Michel said in a study published in the summer issue of The Sociological Quarterly. Quoting one of her study subjects, Michel wrote: “When someone left before midnight, you’d hear comments like ‘half a day today?’”
Some bankers train themselves to sleep in spurts a couple times a day to maximize their time awake. The long hours and lack of sleep lead to early burnout rates in investment banking; the average banker lasts seven to nine years and typically leaves by age 35, said Michel, who began her career at Goldman Sachs Group (GS).
“Starting in year four, bankers started to experience sometimes debilitating physical and psychological breakdowns,” Michel said. Many suffered from chronic exhaustion, insomnia, back and body pain, autoimmune diseases, heart arrhythmias, addictions, and eating disorders, she found. The brutal work schedule also began to impair judgment, creativity, and ethical sensitivity, she said.
Even when bankers eventually left to pursue a better work/life balance in other industries, they couldn’t seem to leave their brutal work schedules behind, she found. And they made life miserable for their new colleagues.
They implemented practices, Michel said, that sometimes had the “unintended consequence of causing people to work excessively hard.”
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
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Comments<:
Everyone has the right to dispose his time as he wishes. If a person wants to work for 16 or 20 hours a day, then nobody can prohibit it. But the main question is - how free are people in their choice?
Junior investing bankers work daily, through holidays from 10:00 a.m. to 02:00 a.m. Though, sometimes they ”pull an all-nighter”: work all night without leaving home. What is the point of this? It is important to understand that is not a problem for the Bank to hire more people and distribute the work in such a manner that people work as per a standard schedule. Wouldn’t it be possible to hire two employees instead of one, working 100 hours a week and receiving fabulous money ( investment banker’s salary is several hundred thousand dollars a year)? These two employees would work for 50 hours a week and get income twice as little, but still much higher than in other jobs.
Yet, it is not about the amount of work. The point is that each investment banker wants to demonstrate that he is more needed by his superior than his colleague. Modern corporate culture of the investment banks makes people the “slaves” of money and success.