An Outbreak of Sanity

Following being exposed to a potential lethal pandemic and other mistreatment by their employers, employees are less willing to go for that proverbial "Extra Mile" for the benefit of their bosses.

People are increasingly unwilling to work outrageous overtime to cover their bosses mistakes

Where have all the go-getters gone?

At law firm Nixon Peabody LLP, associates have started saying no to working weekends, prompting partners to ask more people to help complete time-sensitive work. TGS Insurance in Texas has struggled to fill promotions, and bosses often have to coax staffers to apply. And Maine-based marketing company Pulp+Wire plans to shut down for two weeks next year now that staffers are taking more vacation than they used to.

“The passion that we used to see in work is lower now, and you find it in fewer people—at least in the last two years,” says Sumithra Jagannath, president of ZED Digital, which makes digital ticket scanners. The company, based in Columbus, Ohio, recently moved about 20 remote engineering and marketing roles to Canada and India, where she said it’s easier to find talent who will go above and beyond.

Since the onset of the pandemic, several employees have asked for more pay when managers asked that they do more work, she says. “It was not like that before Covid at all,” she adds.

This  is a welcome development.

Many white-collar workers say the events of the past three years have reordered their priorities and showed them what they were missing when they were spending so much time at the office. Now that normalcy is returning, even some of the workers who used to be always on and always striving say they find themselves eyeing the clock as the day winds down, saying no to overtime work or even taking pay cuts for better work-life balance.

The reduced ambition can leave companies needing more people to do the same amount of work, something that ultimately could be a drag on American economic productivity. And bosses are openly considering the ramifications. Comments by Home Depot Inc. co-founder Bernie Marcus that “nobody works, nobody gives a damn,” with possible implications for the future of capitalism, in the Financial Times spread quickly this week. A spokeswoman for the retailer said: “Bernie Marcus retired from The Home Depot more than 20 years ago and does not speak on behalf of the company.”

Given the state of the US economy, it could be argued that increased leisure time, and increased employment generally would be a boost to the US economy.

Consumer spending, and guys working 60 hours a week is what drives the economy.

………

Even in hard-charging fields like law and finance, where all-nighters aren’t uncommon, some professionals are objecting to the grind. A group of first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. complained to bank leaders last year that they were working an average of 95 hours a week and that job stress had harmed their physical and mental health. Goldman, in response, said it would hire additional bankers and more strictly enforce boundaries around working hours. In an American Bar Association survey of nearly 2,000 members this year, 44% of young lawyers said they would leave their jobs for a greater ability to work remotely elsewhere.

………

The attitude shift stretches well beyond fields where extreme hours have been the norm. It also appears to cross geographies and span generations. Early in the pandemic, corporate leaders blamed young workers for not wanting to work as hard as their older counterparts, says Brian Balonick, the regional managing partner of law firm Fisher Phillips LLP’s Pittsburgh office, specializing in labor. Now, he says, there’s a realization that the way Americans want to work has changed more widely.

………

Damon Diamantaras, CEO of Houston-based TGS Insurance, says he notices the change when promotion opportunities come up at the 200-employee independent insurance agency. A decade ago, new hires would typically ask within weeks what it took to be promoted to manager, he says. Now, more times than not, he says, managers need to proactively identify candidates for higher positions—and seek them out, instead of waiting for workers to raise their hands. He says he tells staff at company meetings to consider their futures at the firm and that many are capable of more than they realize.

These days, many workers are content doing the same job they’ve done, Mr. Diamantaras says. The pay is comfortable, the company is stable and many workers want to make time for friends and activities: “That’s OK, but you have to have people—we constantly look for people—who have drive, that we feel like we can promote to higher-paying jobs in the organization.”

These folks realize that the promises of promotions is a lie.

The game is to get 10 people to work their asses off for a position that only one of them will get.

………

In an August survey of 1,234 HR employees, 45% said their organization has struggled more than usual to motivate employees to work beyond the required scope of their job in the past six months, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, which conducted the poll.

………

Many workers say they see little connection between working hard and being rewarded. About half of the 1,071 respondents to a May survey by The Wall Street Journal and NORC at the University of Chicago said they don’t have a good chance of improving their standard of living, compared with 27% who said they do. The 27% figure was a 20 percentage-point drop from a year earlier. About 60% said they were pessimistic about most people’s ability to achieve the American dream.

I call this embracing reality.

People are realizing that being on the treadmill gets you nowhere.

The status quo from the before times was unsustainable.  It was running on goodwill built up before the Reagan era, essentially eating morale seed corn for years, and to quote Herbert Stein, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."