Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives. Madeleine Bunting
But the biggest complaint of all is the sheer volume of emails. The higher you rise in an organisation, the bigger your electronic in-tray: an average of twenty-two emails a day at junior management level increases to forty-seven at the most senior, and the figure is growing all the time.16 Emails have a disproportionate impact on long and anti-social hours because they are typically dealt with either at the beginning or the end of the day. Asynchronous communication may have seemed initially like a form of liberation – you could find a moment in your own time to reply – but it is indeed often in your own time. Bendis found that: ‘For managers not at their desks for much of the day because they are in meetings, the only time to catch up is out of normal working hours. A lot of people were printing them out to read on the train or tube or picking them up at weekends.’ Those working part-time often have proportionally an even bigger email in-tray to deal with – catching up on the day or days they’ve been off. Taking a long holiday exacts a heavy price when emails pile up at the rate of fifty to a hundred a day, and many admit to checking up on them while they’re away, to prevent the build-up. Mary is a senior executive in an NHS trust:
I have an absolutely enormous electronic in-tray – usually about 250 to attend to. Of those about two hundred will include an attachment which requires my reading and commenting on it. I get about fifty emails a day, and 50 per cent of them I deal with immediately. Another 25 per cent I try and deal with at the end of the day and another 25 per cent get dealt with later. Usually I’ll be in at the weekend and have a clear-out. I had some time away recently and got back to find five hundred emails waiting. A lot of them have useful information, especially if you want to keep a breadth of knowledge of what’s going on in the organisation. In the past, managers of a particular expertise were left to deal with that but it’s all more interconnecting now.
The ‘carbon-copy’ function of email gets a big share of the blame for its volume. Senior managers are often being copied into emails just to cover the employee’s back, or in the hope of drawing attention to their work. Bendis found in her study that email was being used to seek ‘positive strokes’, particularly from a manager to an underling, the reply being the modern-day equivalent of a pat on the back,
But the carbon-copy email can also be vital. Mary explained how she has to keep abreast of a huge range of information, because she never knows at what point a particular development could impact on her responsibilities. A predecessor in her type of job twenty years ago would have kept his (it probably would have been a man) focus on his own department, she commented, but that thinking is now scorned as creating ‘silo’ organisations which can’t keep up with the speed of information flow and the pace of change. The sociologist Manuel Castells coined the phrase ‘the network society’ to describe the relationships which open up in the constantly changing and unpredictable digital society. The interconnectedness draws more and more activities into relationship with each other: the company whose stock price rises on rumours of a government initiative, the supplier whose contracts could then be hit, and so on. It’s the syndrome of the butterfly flapping its wings in the Bay of Bengal which causes storms elsewhere: small actions can have disproportionate consequences. The quality of the network is what determines the success or failure of the organisation or individual: you never know from what point will come information which may determine opportunity or disadvantage.
The network society has a very clear impact on hard work. The individual who has built up a network of useful relationships is at the nodal point of intersection where information is accurately analysed, decisions are made and power lies, but this is also where information overload is at its most acute. The more points of intersection the node bears, and thus the more flows of information, the more effective the decision-making and the potential for brilliant strategic breakthroughs – and, of course, the more work…much more work.
This makes the task of management much more complex – there are many more balls to keep juggling. And it makes the concept of professionalism, where definitions of commitment have always incorporated long hours and availability to the client, positively punishing. The interface with clients becomes more demanding; in the most skilled, lucrative parts of the labour market they want instant access throughout waking hours, while intensified competition accelerates the required turnaround times. The result is the kind of hours common in banking, corporate law, accountancy and consultancy, where seventy-hour weeks can be common and the timelessness of 24/7 global capitalism is unmediated by any reference to human well-being.
The Fast Eat the Slow
The speed with which information is processed and acted upon becomes a critical source of competitive advantage. At the heart of fast-moving competitive sectors of the knowledge economy the pace of work is in unpredictable spurts of intense activity; a far cry from the steady routine which was regarded as a great achievement of industrialised bureaucracies. This is where information technology is transforming our concept of time, hugely speeding up many processes and putting the capacity for human beings to adapt their organisation of work, and to keep up, under constant severe pressure; the computing power of silicon chips doubles every eighteen months, so engineering calculations which would have taken many years in the 1940s took two days by 1969, four hours by 1976, and a mere fifteen minutes today. That kind of speed provides extraordinary opportunities, but the competition is intense. As Klaus Schwab, President of the World Economic Forum, put it, ‘We are moving from a world in which the big eat the small to a world in which the fast eat the slow.’
For the internet bank egg, that kind of comment has been a driving principle in its short, successful history, egg is about as far from Saltfillas as one could imagine: squeezed into a basement of the great Victorian red-brick palace of Prudential Insurance in central London, it claims to be the biggest finance services provider on the internet, and one of the four most successful creations of the dot.com boom after Amazon, eBay and Yahoo. Mike Harris, who set up the company as its first Chief Executive under the wing of the Prudential, knows a lot about speed and how crucial it is for success; he also knows how it makes for a lot of hard work. He says there is simply nothing he can do about the demanding deadlines, and he recounts the dizzying pace of egg’s development:
We launched in October 1998 on an artificially set date to control the amount spent on the launch – to prevent ‘creeping sophistication’. We didn’t want an overspecified model in the marketplace, because the world will have changed by the time you get round to bringing it out. As soon as you spot a gap in the market, it has to be exploited – a lot of our success has been that we’ve seen an opportunity and we’ve got to the market quickest. That urgency is part of the culture, and it causes stress inevitably; there is nothing you can do about that, you can only manage the stress through support and resources. I’m sure we impose unnecessarily tight deadlines.
The launch of a new business is always very stressful…people were working seven days a week for three to four months prior to the launch. It’s not that we asked them to, it just gets very committed and very intense. After a big launch you can normally ease off, but for us it got even worse because of the volume of business – we reached our five-year target in the first six months, with 500,000 customers and £5 billion in deposits. Nothing worked, we didn’t have the capacity, and it put huge strain on all of us and it was crisis after crisis; some people did get very stressed, but it felt supportive, it didn’t feel too hard.
He paused and added that he’d recently been looking at a video of the egg management team made about five years ago. He admitted, ‘It was a bit of a shocker for me to see how all the management had aged in that time.’ He continued: ‘Within a few months, we switched to internet supported by phones rather than the other way around, bringing forward a strategy we had intended to implement over three years, but the internet was moving fast. By September 1999 we launched the credit card, and it was the fastest-growing internet credit card in the world; the pace was frenetic. It was the launch all over again.’ By February 2000 egg’s rate of expansion had been rapid, and it went for an IPO, Initial Public Offering, raising capital on the stock market. The following year it acquired a French internet bank. The pace hasn’t slackened.
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