A few times every year, a major company is in the crosshairs of a larger work culture and burnout debate. It’s been Goldman Sachs many a time before, and it appears to be them again—13 first-year analysts in Goldman’s investment banking unit surveyed themselves about their work hours, which can reach 110 per week, and then organized those concerns into a detailed PowerPoint presentation that has since spilled onto social media. The report even includes bar charts showing the analysts’ deterioration from job stress. Before they arrived at Goldman, the analysts rated their mental and physical health on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the healthiest, at 8.8 and 9, respectively. Since then, those numbers have plunged to 2.8 and 2.3, respectively.
Also worth noting that, at the same time as this presentation leaked, the head of Goldman was publicly rejecting work from home as “the new normal,” indicating his people would be coming back in droves.
Now, while salary is an obvious elephant in the room here—young Goldman analysts are handsomely compensated, and many look at that and say “Well, that comes with more working hours”—there’s a bigger discussion around engagement to be had.
Employee engagement scores on major surveys did increase a bit during COVID (in some industries, and predominantly white-collar work), but in the last 10 years those scores haven't really budged; sometimes they've gone down.
In the same time, we’ve had enough thought leadership on engagement (and its cousin, “employee experience”) to circle the Earth several times, but until a once-every-100-years-and-white-collar-work-got-shifted-big-time pandemic hit, those action items didn’t seem to be working.
What gives?
Some of this rests on the shoulders of vocabulary. To the top of the hierarchy, work is about being in sixth gear, shipping products, and beating your rivals. They know one definition of "engagement," which is when they got down on one knee, or when their children headed towards the altar. And many things that make employees more “engaged,” such as the ability not to burn out in a job, go directly against how upper management thinks, where answering emails at 12:03 AM is a badge of honor.
Maybe instead of embracing employee engagement models, we should consider employee DISengagement models.
Huh?
“Place more emphasis on actual leisure”
But to make this a reality, organizations need to place more emphasis on actual leisure—allowing workers to leave the office entirely to refresh. Workplaces that attempt to build leisure opportunities into the workspace itself to keep their employees on-site may be doing themselves, and their employees, a disservice. Because even though amenities like food trucks, foosball tables, and extensive schedules of social events may seem really cool, they are still at work.
“The key for organizations is to get away from needing to control employees at all times and let them disengage,” Waytz says.
One of my colleagues actually relayed this story: they had a job in 2018-2019 where one of the managing directors told the repeatedly "I'm not big on desk time" and/or "You're not a slave to a clock" but then 75 percent of the time you tried to work from home or a coffee shop, someone balked or you got an email from another manager saying "Your teammates are concerned about your collaboration ..."
The fact is, work islargely about control and relevance to most people. That is what makes this idea hard.
So does vocabulary
If you went to a decision-maker and said "Hey boss, I want my employees to be more disengaged this year," said boss would automatically worry that productivity was going to drop.
The word "disengagement" would get people riled up at most jobs, as would the word "leisure." Again, work is about grinding, hustling, being in 10th gear, shipping, being relevant, and beating rivals. That is how people who build companies and employ others tend to look at work.
As a result, any proposals around "Hey, give these people more leisure time" are typically met with "But my productivity! I need them here hitting targets!"
So, broadly speaking, these terms would never work. We’d need another word for it.
Is there research or science on working less and achieving more?
Quite a bit, actually:
- From 2010-2014, Boston Consulting Group was the subject of a study about uninterrupted time off. Before we get into the results of that, you need to think about how consultants are branded; it’s a very “always on” profession. In fact, when the study began, 94% of the participants said they were working 50+ hours a week, and 50% said 65+ hours a week, while “not counting” time on email. That’s quite a bit of work. The core finding? “Indeed, we found that when the assumption that everyone needs to be always available was collectively challenged, not only could individuals take time off, but their work actually benefited.” The senior leaders of BCG went ahead with a predictable time off model after the experiment concluded.
- As many people were bullish that COVID would finally scale the idea of a four-day work week, one study that kept coming up was Microsoft’s Japan offices, which tried it—and saw worker productivity increase 40%+. To be clear, the 40 hours was still being met, usually on a 4x10 model, or a 9/80. Patagonia has done similar over time, being called “a company that profits as it pampers workers” by The Washington Post in 2014.
- Research by Stellan Ohlsson and Mark Beeman (a pioneer in neuroscience research into insight), both mentioned in my book Your Brain At Work and summarized in this 2009 Psychology Today article, show that new ways of thinking are needed for insightful, impact problem-solving. If you’re spending 65+ hours a week on conventional work tasks and emails, those insights and “A-Ha!” moments are not coming as frequently. There is much value in a rested mind.
What would the logistics of disengagement look like?
Increasingly train managers that it doesn't really matter where a person is, per se, so long as the work is getting done. You hire people for the work to get done. That's why we still hire off bullet points. We might claim we are hiring innovative, curious people, but we're usually not. We are hiring so the work gets done.
But we have Wi-Fi at scale in the first world. And we have suites to organize info and forms (Google!) and suites to video-conference (Skype! Zoom!)
So none of the control stuff really matters. Managers hang onto it for their own sense of relevance and concerns that someone not in front of them might be on a beach, or looking at Facebook. The beautiful irony is that often the person right in front of them is still looking at Facebook, but somehow the idea that the person is right in front of them comforts said manager.
You just need to explain to managers more and more that human beings have lives outside of their deliverables, and sometimes they need to go live those lives at the vet, the dentist, the dry cleaner, or sushi lunch with their significant other.
Also explain to managers that disengaged time boosts cognitive capacity and cognitive load, which means employees get back to the KPI sets refreshed with a different perspective. Their solutions and ideas are better.
The bottom line, logistically: If the work is getting done, this should be allowed. We do this with sales guys all the time. If they're top performers, no one ever questions where they are.
If the work isn't getting done, fire the employee. It's probably legally justified, if you even live in a place where you might need to justify it. (At-will states, etc.)
This isn't complicated: Let people disengage (don't use that word) from work if they're performing their tasks at the right level. If they're not, feel free to clamp down on them like most managers do anyway.
But instead of jamming the square peg of employee engagement into the round hole of the actual psychology of work, maybe we should consider this disengagement idea a little bit more. And letting people have elements of their life back is a form of talent regeneration, whereby you leave your people better than you found them.
It might not ultimately work for Goldman, but it could for you.
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