The New Zealand Herald reports workers who stay after a round of redundancies suffer as much stress and anxiety as the people who lose their jobs.

I doubt this is always true.

Redundancy is never fun. Having your livelihood snatched away, facing a mortgagee sale and wondering where the next meal is coming from is about as stressful as things get.

As someone who has been in both positions, I can speak from experience on this.

Nevertheless, the Auckland-based researchers do have a point. Things are extremely stressful for people left when companies trim their staff numbers. Not least because they’ll have to cope with extra work. And, as the story points out, they’ll be wondering who is next for the chop.

Staff who stay suffer from stress – National – NZ Herald News.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Work Overload Brings Panic, Anxiety, Stress (abcnews.go.com)

It’s the ultimate insult. You get given the sack, but your boss asks you to train your, cheaper, replacement. Terri Dreismeier writes about this in Omaha Workplace Examiner: Oh, by the way, would you train your replacement?

Dreismeier writes;

In 2004, computer programmers working at Boeing were downsized and replaced with foreign workers. Employees were told that “offshoring” was necessary to reduce costs and streamline services. But in a painful twist, several of these programmers were asked to train the replacements. Managers basically requested these dedicated employees to dig their own unemployment graves

What would you do? And if you were a manager would you have the nerve to ask your employees the same question?

Next time you drive through the CBD late at night, notice how many offices are brightly lit. You’ll probably notice a lot are.

• A handful might be businesses like call centres, newspapers or IT operations that routinely work night shifts.
• In some cases the offices might be being cleaned.
• Other may be empty. Some companies like to light their offices at night as a gesture of solidarity with global warming deniers. Way to go boys.

Yet even from a moving car you maybe able to spot CBD offices housing a surprisingly large number of people are still working.

The last time I drove through my local city I noticed exactly that and this was at around midnight. I know from experience that the situation is similar in cities around the world.

People are working longer hours

Of course, long hours are not unusual for knowledge workers. They are particularly common among younger people in their late teens and early twenties. But it happens right across all age ranges.

Surveys show that the average working week for a full time employee in New Zealand is now around 44 hours. Twenty percent of employees regularly work more than 50 hours a week.

New Zealand isn’t different from other countries.

Given that a sizeable section of the workforce still works shifts or fixed hours and that there are still many clock-watchers who race out of the door at 5.00pm or 5.30pm this means that for committed workers the average working week is considerably longer.

At a guess I’d say readers of this column are more likely to average 48 hours a week.

But that’s only an average. Some will work more than that.

Work marathons are not a problem

I’m certain we’ve all pulled the occasional marathon work session or two. Over short periods these are not a problem.

However, over the long term, if excessive work hours are not strictly controlled they can lead to serious health issues and other major problems in the workplace. Not to mention grave conflicts with those increasingly rare parts of our lives that happen away from work.

Things aren’t as bad today as they were at the height of the dotcom frenzy, but there are still plenty of people who habitually work 12 to 16 hour days. And for people in cities like Sydney or London they often have to commute long distances before and after work.

Most people who work long hours do so because of real work pressures – for example you may be struggling to meet deadlines. This should be occasional rather than the norm. Frequent long hours are usually a sign that something is badly wrong at your workplace. Aprat from anything else, it’s quiet possible your employer is not playing fair with staffing levels. And that means you are being exploited.

Twisted workplace culture

We’ve all seen companies that demand or extract long hours because of a twisted culture. I’ve certainly worked in places where there has been some complicated game of chicken going on, with employees competing to show management who is the most loyal and dedicated worker by staying in the office later and later.

Of course these employers might argue that there’s a severe skills shortage so existing workers need to do more. There’s an element of truth. But on the other hand, abusing something rare and precious is a perverse way to run a business.

No doubt some employees feel pressure to work long hours in order to save their jobs in a recession. And yes, there are employers only too willing to exploit this fear.

The knowledge worker credo says that you simply don’t have to put up with that kind of nonsense. Even in a global recession. In the good times there’s always another employer who needs your skills. So if you are pressured to regularly work excessive hours – and in my opinion excessive hours is more than 50 hours a week sustained over a long period – then you have every reason to walk. Even in the bad times you can often find a better deal.

Now I have to be careful writing about this kind of issue. The last time I touched on something similar I received large amounts of angry and abusive email from readers who think looking after oneself is strictly for sissies. So we’ll all doff our caps in reverence to the sheer manliness of the hardened macho types and remind ourselves of two truths about long hours.

• First, sustained long hours are not healthy. Period. If you continue to work around the clock you will damage your body. You almost certainly won’t be getting enough exercise. There’s a good chance you won’t be eating properly. And you probably won’t be giving yourself enough downtime.
• Second, there’s a lot of scientific evidence that long working hours are simply not productive.

We’ll look closer at both these issues another time. For now, ask yourself if all the hours you work are necessary. Even if the only pressures are self-imposed, you might want to evaluate your relationship with your employer in terms of the hours you spend working.

Brian Glick writing in Computing quotes Trade Union Congress figures suggesting one-third of British IT professionals work 34 days unpaid every year. I expect that’s standard around the English-speaking world, maybe the entire world. It’s also not an unusual number for knowledge workers in general.

If we accept most people are expected to work 40 hours a week for 47 weeks of the year (that’s standard in New Zealand) that means IT workers do around 15 percent more work than they are paid for. Or, put another way, they give employers a 15 percent discount on their salary.

Glick and the TUC are concerned about the health implications of this additional workload. They are right to be. A lot of those extra hours will be worked late into the night or even overnight. People may turn in seven day weeks for weeks on end and so on.

I’d like to add four more concerns.

• First, the additional hours may score workers brownie points with their managers, but they may not be productive. There’s lots of evidence that people’s productivity drops after so many hours on the job (different sources quote different numbers here) but take it as read that you won’t get as much done in your ninth hour of working as in your first hour.
• Second, tired workers are more likely to make serious mistakes than refreshed ones. Maybe this isn’t so serious for IT workers as for say, lorry or truck drivers, but trashing databases and screwing systems can be costly.
• Third, by implication there are unemployed people out there, probably friends and former colleagues of those in employment, who would only be too willing to take on some of the burden.
• Fourth, I once had a job in a company where there was almost a competition amongst staff to see who could work latest each night. It had low morale and a high staff turnover. That was far more costly to the company’s owners than stumping up for a few extra employees or contractors.

Previous generations fought long and hard to establish the 40-hour week and annual leave. It would be a great mistake if today’s workers threw all that away.

IT workers giving away free time – vnunet.com.

Related articles by Zemanta

• One in five workers put in unpaid overtime union claims (telegraph.co.uk)

Take a break - image by Meredit Farmer via Flickr

As someone who started their working life in the Northern Hemisphere, one of the hardest adjustments to make is that because Christmas coincides with summer, antipodeans take all their holiday in one big helping. Or at least they did until the late 1980s.

When I first arrived in Wellington, New Zealand I found the summer break hard to cope with. In those days the city more or less closed down between Christmas Eve and Waitangi day (February 6). For roughly six weeks it was nigh on impossible to buy a cooked lunch, get one’s teeth fixed or car repaired. Trains and buses ran reduced timetables. It was even harder to get anyone to make a business decision. Woe betide anyone who didn’t get their budgets signed-off before December 24^th.

Australia, at least Sydney and Melbourne, weren’t so comprehensively sleepy over summer, but you’d still have difficulty getting in touch with people between Christmas and Australia day. I suspect, but don’t know for sure that regional Australia was as shuttered as New Zealand. We’ll avoid the temptation for wisecracks about Canberra.

Although the politicians somehow still manage to score extended summer breaks, these days Wellington and Auckland start buzzing (albeit at a slightly reduced pace) a few days after Christmas while Sydney and Melbourne barely pause at all. I know from experience that many employees, particularly in retail jobs, are pressured to work longer hours at this time of year.

Yet even now many companies and departments close down for two or three weeks. Some newspapers stop publishing, TV channels run reduced schedules and some businesses offer reduced services. It might not be the four, five or six week shut down enjoyed by earlier generations, but there’s a distinct feeling the city is depopulated and the resorts are crowded.

Most Northern Europeans take no more than a week or so around Christmas. In England, people generally work until December 24^th and are back at their desks by January 2^nd, or maybe the following day if the public holiday falls on a weekend. Scots get an extra day’s holiday for Hogmanay.

Poms typically get a couple of weeks off in their summer along with a healthy swag of public holidays (“Bank Holidays”) throughout the year. Generally they have enough leave days left over to take a third small break. The French still have a tradition of taking a month in mid-year. During August Parisians leave town en masse as invading hoards of plaid-clad American tourists invade.

On the whole Poms work roughly as many days as Australians and, thanks to recent law changes, New Zealanders. Other Northern European countries work fewer days. Interestingly these other nations tend to have higher worker productivity rates.

In my view, the antipodean habit of having one long annual break over Christmas is not as useful or as productive as the Northern European tradition of taking a short mid-Winter Christmas break and a relatively short summer break. I also suspect that the one long Christmas break is easier lost to a demanding job than the two breaks enjoyed by Europeans.

Speaking from a personal, rather than a researched point of view, the good thing about Europe’s two or three break system is that it enables one to keep fresher. I’ve found that working 11 months then resting for one month is much harder than working a few months en bloc and taking shorter breaks. This is particularly true if your work involves creative thinking – and let’s face it, most Knowledge Workers need to think creatively.

I’d like to see New Zealand embrace Matariki, the Maori winter solstice, as a short mid-winter holiday. It would also be a good excuse for an additional public holiday – New Zealanders go for too long without a break at that time of year. I’m sure Australia can think up a suitable excuse for a similar festival.

With all the talk of 24 times 7 operations, Knowledge Workers are finding it increasingly hard to take any leave at all. That’s simply not wise. It hurts your effectiveness. You might not be able to get away from your desk for a whole fortnight at once, but you should endeavour to escape for two or three weeklong breaks during the course of the year. You’ll be more productive for it.

Image via Wikipedia

Twenty years ago, knowledge workers and other professionals automatically dressed for success every working day. Men would generally wear suits or something similar. Male colours would be either dark blue or sit somewhere on a monochrome scale between light grey and charcoal. Their black shoes would shine and their striped or plain shirts would be crisply ironed. A tie was essential. Women could use more imagination and colour, but until the mid-1990s formal office clothes were still the norm in New Zealand and Australia. This is no longer the case in either country. Things are similar in the UK, Europe and North America.

You still see pockets of smartness. However, these days formal office clothes tend to be the exception rather than the norm. Even companies like IBM, which gained the nickname Big Blue from the colour of its salesmen’s suits, allow non-customer facing staff to dress down some of the time.

Stand in Sydney’s Australia Square or on Auckland;s Queen Street at lunchtime and you’ll even see a few suits walk by, but at least half the crowd will be dressed in ‘smart casual’ gear and there will be a handful who are downright scruffy.

For every Italian suit there’ll be half a dozen woolen jumper and for every Chanel two-piece you’ll see a dozen or more items from this season’s Country Road catalogue. You don’t need to look much harder to spot T-shirts or company logo polo shirt – many will have sport a web address. You’ll see running shoes and casual shoes, but not many of the smartly shined variety. Things have changed.

There are different theories about what the shift to casual dressing means. Perhaps the clearest message is for investors to start shorting stocks in tie manufacturers.

One conservative school of thought says it’s all about the decline of western civilisation – it’s certainly true that the new dress code applies to most first world economies. If this is true, we’ll eventually we’ll all end up half naked during the summer and rugged up in daggy looking track pants and polar fleece through the winter. (There are knowledge workers in Australia and New Zealand who already adhere to this more informal dress code).

Another theory says that casual dressing has become popular because people need to be comfortable given that they now work such long and anti-social hours. There’s something in this. Waering a tight collar for 14 hours is no joke.

A third view is that talent is so hard to recruit these days that companies no longer dare impose dress codes on staff because they fear they won’t be able to replace people. In a article printed some years ago, the Economist came to the same conclusion, but first it put forward an interesting alternative theory.

Although the story was specifically about Wall Street in New York, it observed the same phenomena. According to the Economist, in the absence of developing their own Internet strategies old economy companies have decided that allowing staff to look like work for new economy firms is the next best thing. “Maybe,” says the story, “creativity is aided by chinos and an open collar”.

The new casual look of the corporate workforce is only one visible symptom of the recent tectonic shift in power. It underlines the fact that those of us in the knowledge economy can, up to a point, dictate the terms of our employment. If your current employer isn’t willing to put up with Mambo shorts and cargo pants then another one down the road will – and will probably pay you more into the bargain.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ‘Smart casual’ signals end of the business suit
• Redefining Business Casual

Here’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. The knowledge workers’ manifesto:

1. Although there may be short-term ups and downs, in general there are not enough skilled workers to meet demand.
2. This applies equally to industries, companies, departments, economic regions and nations.
3. It is unlikely to change in the near future, despite economic turmoil.
4. Knowledge workers are highly mobile.
5. With obvious limitations, most can work for almost any employer they choose anywhere in the world.
6. Many companies and countries welcome knowledge workers with open arms.
7. Any form of discrimination is likely to reduce your available pool of knowledge workers.
8. Regardless of any value judgements about right and wrong, bosses, companies, political leaders and nations that do not treat knowledge workers with respect, are unlikely to retain their services.
9. In other words, they can walk.
10. And they will walk if pushed.
11. If you are an employer, assume other employers are already trying to woo your knowledge workers.
12. All other things being equal (and they’re not, but let’s imagine for a moment they are) knowledge workers’ skills go to the highest bidder.
13. But the bidder need not necessarily be offering more cash.
14. One of the inequalities is tax. If a nation taxes knowledge workers too highly compared with other countries, it can expect to see a brain drain. In fact many countries are already facing exactly this.
15. Knowledge workers also need other things governments can supply.
16. For example, education. A strong educational system is essential for a knowledge economy. It also attracts knowledge workers from elsewhere.
17. So does a good telecommunications infrastructure.
18. In most countries private industry doesn’t seem capable of delivering this without a kick up the backside. If you want a knowledge economy start kicking.
19. Free markets are important.
20. But the Asian experience suggests they may not be essential.
21. Likewise political freedom.
22. Sometimes you need to provide incubators to get a knowledge-based business culture off the ground.
23. A culture of recognising and rewarding intellectual achievement helps.
24. America is not the only knowledge economy. It is not the only workable model.

I’ll add other points as I think of them. Maybe you can help. Is there something obvious belonging here that I’m missing?

In his blog post The Stark Difference between Skills-based and Knowledge Workers Michael Hanley at the E-learning curve suggest this table from John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers should be kept by every learning professional’s desk as a reminder of the value of their work.
It’s just as valuable for knowledge workers seeking to navigate the new economic landscape they inhabit, mind you, some of the elements in the table now look out of date (Hanley admits he dug this table out the attic so it wasn’t created yesterday.) For example, haven’t public/private partnerships fallen out of fashion?

Hasn’t the term Win-Win become yet another meaningless management cliche? You don’t hear too much talk of options these days. And, given the financial turmoil of recent weeks, I suspect right now many readers would choose security over risk-taking at the moment.

Nevertheless, this is worth book-marking or clipping for future reference.

Table 1. The Emergence of a New Economy

Source: John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers