Why Overworking Employees Is Hurting You

Overwork is common, especially at higher pay grades, but is it really helping? It turns out it’s doing the opposite — and the best way to stop it is to rethink work-life balance.

By Jeff Steen

Increasingly, young workers want to maintain a personal life that is sacred, unquestionably separate from work. No more toil-to-the-bone weeks; work should start no sooner than 8 am and end no later than 5pm.

The reaction from industry vets, however, has often been dismissal. Some of the boundary-setting upstarts were even called lazy.

But those upstarts were on to something.

The career progression for many industry newbies is well-known: low salary and low expectations to start, with jobs typically involving little more than rote repetition of a task; then slow progression up the ladder of responsibility with, all else being equal, a commensurate increase in pay.

At some point, however, you hit a threshold — a moment when the salary suggests you owe more of your week to your employer than 40 hours.

How much you’re expected to work is different for every industry, but the job creep is real; a once-was 40-hour-a-week gig that was manageable becomes 50 hours, 60 hours, 70 hours. One request to close out a special project becomes several requests for several projects. There isn’t an end.

But there should be.

Above all else, let’s be clear about compensation: a salary should be based on past work performance, experience, skills, training, and education. It is not an unspoken…

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