By definition, most Americans think of a “full-time job” as one that is worked 40 hours per week. For some legal and regulatory purposes, 32 hours will even be classified as full-time. The reality for many workers, however, is quite different. Some professions routinely see workers putting in 60, 70 or 80 hours per week, if not more.
These hours are simply seen as par for the course in parts of some industries; think investment banking, law, medicine, for example. That may just be part of the bargain that employees know full well when they go to work for a big paycheck and lucrative bonus structure.
Long Hours Lead to Burnout
In other cases, those long hours weren’t necessarily what the employee signed up for, and the hard truth for employers is that such arrangements generally aren’t sustainable long-term. Employees become burnt out, disgruntled, sloppy, careless, and unmotivated.
As a general rule, if an employee is consistently working longer-than-anticipated hours, either their job description is incorrect, the employee needs additional training, or another person needs to be added. This is not always easy to hear for cash-strapped employers, and many brush off periods of long hours as temporary situations, until they become regular enough to brush off as just part of the job. This is often a slippery slope that leaves a worker in a very different employment relationship than they thought they were signing up for.
Find Balance to Reduce Time Demands
In any labor market, it costs money and takes time to hire new workers – sometimes great deals of both. That challenge is particularly acute in the current labor market. However difficult and costly it may be to bring on new workers, however, in the long run many companies ultimately learn that it’s less costly than the unsustainable alternative of consistently overworked employees. Additional training and the resulting gains in efficiency and productivity can help close some of the gap, but that will rarely make an employee twice as productive and able to whittle an 80-hour week down to the 40-hour full-time standard.
Lin Grensing-Pophal is a Contributing Editor at HR Daily Advisor.
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