The new, never-ending WORKDAY
Many WFH employees feel they must always be available
An executive at JPMorgan Chase & Co. gets unapologetic messages from colleagues on nights and weekends, including a notably demanding one on Easter Sunday. A web designer whose bedroom doubles as an office has to set an alarm to remind himself to eat during his non-stop workday. At Intel Corp., a vice president with four kids logs 13-hour days while attempting to juggle parenthood and her job.
Almost two months into a nationwide work-from-home experiment with no end in sight, whatever boundaries remained between work and life have almost entirely disappeared.
America’s always-on work culture has reached new heights. The 9-to-5 workday, or any semblance of it, seems like a relic of a bygone era. Long gone are the regretful formalities for calling or emailing at inappropriate times. Burnt-out WFH employees feel they have even less free time than when they spent hours commuting.
“I honest to goodness am wearing the exact same outfit that I started with on Monday,” Rachel Mushahwar, the vice president and general manager of U.S. sales and marketing at Intel, said on a recent Thursday. “I think I’ve showered three times.”
Some predicted the great workfrom-home migration of the pandemic would usher in a new age of flexible work arrangements. As of 2017 only 3% of full-time workers in the U.S. said they “primarily” worked out of a home office, in a Census Bureau survey.
Then millions began sheltering at home for what was originally thought to be a temporary hiatus. Many mapped out plans to fill time they would’ve spent commuting to take up new hobbies or get into the best shape of their lives. It looked like the beginnings of a telecommuting revolution.
Now, many people are overworked, stressed and eager to get back to the office. In the U.S., homebound employees are logging three hours more per day on the job than before city and state-wide lockdowns, according to data from NordVPN, which tracks when users connect and disconnect from its service.
The contours of the workday have changed, too. Without commutes, wake-up times have shifted later,
|
NordVPN found, but peak email time has crept up an hour to 9 a.m., according to data from email client Superhuman. Surfshark, another VPN provider, has seen spikes in usage from midnight to 3 a.m. that were not there before the COVID-19 outbreak.
One big problem is there’s no escape. With nothing much to do and nowhere to go, people feel like they have no legitimate excuse for being unavailable. One JPMorgan employee interrupted his morning shower to join an impromptu meeting after seeing a message from a colleague on his Apple Watch.
Then there’s the fact that people have turned their living spaces into makeshift offices, making it nearly impossible to disconnect. Having an extra room helps, but not much, said John Foster, who has been home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, since midMarch doing financial compliance for a manufacturing company. His workspace is next to the living room.
Others say they feel pressure from bosses to prove they’re working, especially as the economy takes a hit and layoffs loom. At Constellation Software Inc. in Toronto, more than 100 employees got an email from a superior that said: “Don’t get distracted because you are on your own. It is easy to get into bad habits,” read the email reviewed by Bloomberg.
“You know we will be watching closely,” the same manager wrote in an earlier message. A Constellation Software representative didn’t return messages seeking comment.
In reality, despite stereotypes that telecommuting breeds slacking, early data suggest productivity is up, at least at some companies.
“We’ve seen, anecdotally, some increases in productivity for some of our developers as they’re hunkered and focused at home,” Bank of New York Mellon Corp. Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo said.
An internal case study at Publicis Sapient, an IT consulting company that tracked work by 410 employees on roughly 40 tech-focused projects for a large New York-based investment bank also found a productivity bump.
The gains haven’t come without costs. By early April, about 45% of workers said they were burned out, according to a survey of 1,001 U.S. employees by Eagle Hill Consulting. Almost half attributed the mental toll to an increased workload, the challenge of juggling personal and professional life and a lack of communication and support from their employer. Maintaining employee morale has proved difficult, said two-thirds of human resources professionals surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management last month.
Parents with kids at home are stretched particularly thin, as they handle work and child-care duties, which now include learning sessions. In two-thirds of married couples with children in the U.S., both parents work.
A 31-year-old web designer at a medium-sized software company who declined to be named said he’s starting to lose steam working 12-hour days from his tiny bedroom to meet the demands of clients and supervisors, who expect him to immediately respond to emails.
His apartment doesn’t doesn’t have an office, and his roommates, a woman and her child, often are in the living room. He feels pressure to work harder than normal.
Some employers are attempting to help people cope. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. gave staff an extra 10 days of family leave; Microsoft Corp. is offering its workers an additional 12 weeks of parental leave. At Starbucks Corp., employees now get 20 free therapy sessions.
Mushahwar’s 8-year-old recently asked when all this was going to end. “I don’t have a good answer for him.”