Overwork is generally seen as a self-imposed condition.  Pay of course plays a role since a primary reason for working to begin with is to earn money.  Most interesting to me is how people regularly overwork in the present for the chance of a significant pay increase in the distant future.

Tournament pay structures, which tie steep wage differentials to relative differences in performance, are designed to encourage such behavior.  Best performers are rewarded disproportionately more than the next best performer.  This motivates greater work effort as employees compete for the top prize—as they vie for promotion to higher paying management positions, for instance.  Research shows the amount of work hours preferred by aspiring managers is positively related to the number of hours worked by their coworkers. 

Tournament type overwork incentives are strongest for young workers since they have more work years left to gain from a future promotion.  The tradeoff is a rational one, but also a bit reminiscent of J. Wellington Wimpy’s angle to gladly pay Tuesday for a hamburger today. 
                                                              

How do you know which career—or job or organization, for that matter—is the right fit for you?  I’ve been asked this by young undergraduates and working graduate students alike since experience in a career that doesn’t fit isn’t the same as knowing what does fit. 

As a business professor, a social scientist and someone that found ‘fit’ after a substantial career change, I have some insights but no simple answer to offer them.  The truth is that it’s very difficult to predict fit in advance.  It is much easier, however, to spot fit when you’ve found it. 

I was reminded of this yesterday while reading the introduction to a new book.  See below the author’s reflection on his time spent collaborating on research that would ultimately earn him the Nobel Prize in Economics.     

“While writing the article that reported these findings, Amos and I discovered that we enjoyed working together. Amos was always very funny, and in his presence I became funny as well, so we spent hours of solid work in continuous amusement. The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”

By the way, for those of you interested in behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman’s new book is a must read.

Another splendid summer is beginning in the U.S.  However, if you are looking forward to enjoying some long summer weekends away from work you had better keep this information to yourself.  America’s Puritan work ethic combined with a tight economy has made time off a bad word.  So bad, in fact, that employees may be fired for enthusiastically espousing their company’s summer flex schedule. 

Vanessa Williams worked for an economic development agency about 50 miles north of Philadelphia until she reportedly tweeted the following on June 3rd through the company twitter account: "We start summer hours today. That means most of the staff leave at noon, many to hit the links. Do you observe summer hours? What do you do?"

Two extenuating circumstances seem to have ensured her firing.  First, she was a social media specialist at the agency.  Second, the agency is partially funded by taxpayer dollars.  The underlying message is this was bad public relations—sounding suspiciously like a waste of taxpayer dollars—and she should have known better.

But let’s take a closer look.  Flex time is a workplace perk that allows employees to choose their own work hours to some degree.  A common form of this is the condensed work week where employees might complete their required forty hours in four days, then take a three day weekend.  So flex time is not really even time off in the sense of paid time off for hours not worked.  Plus a temporally rigid attitude regarding when work is done (begin at 9, end at 5) seems a bit old fashioned in today’s global, always-connected business environment.

The other key thing to question is why time off is automatically viewed as a financial negative by certain employers, taxpayers or other naysayers.  Research actually suggests the contrary: When productive employees are required to take regular time off their productivity increases rather than decreases.  Harvard researchers Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter drew this conclusion from a four year study of Boston Consulting Group employees, after consultants were forced in some cases to take consistent time off. 

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation without a statutory annual paid leave for employees.  In contrast, citizens throughout Europe have legal rights to a minimum of 20 or more paid vacation days a year, not counting their mandated national holidays.  While many U.S. companies do provide paid time off voluntarily, a 2007 report by the Washington D.C. based Center for Economic and Policy Research (the report appropriately titled “No-Vacation Nation”) indicates that close to one in four Americans receive no paid time off from their employer.  A first step to overcoming this nationally ingrained imbalance is the use of the term “summer hours” with impunity.

“Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expence; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides” (Benjamin Franklin, 1793).

This may be a plus when it comes to short-term productivity.  However, Mr. Franklin did not consider the long-term effects for well-being and sustainability of productivity.  A performance-regeneration paradox exists: Time and energy that we invest into work is time and energy that cannot be invested in regeneration.  People that equate time as money are more likely to forgo leisure hours when faced with this paradoxical choice.   
   

For example, a large healthcare management company inadvertently makes the economic cost of time off salient by allowing employees to opt out of the benefit package (including the paid-time-off benefit) in exchange for a higher hourly rate.  In theory, this gives hourly workers flexibility to pay themselves for time off as they choose.  In practice, one new hire described it as no time off unless he could afford to have his pay shorted. 

Perhaps hard-and-fast economic evaluators of time, like Mr. Franklin, can justify idleness by knowing that the productivity of consultants in one recent study was found to increase when the hard workers were required to take regular time off.