Employees are often under pressure to go ‘over and above’ their normal working hours, but could businesses be doing themselves harm by expecting staff to work long hours? OSH content developer Ryan Exley says it’s time for a rethink.
You only need to look at page 11 of the World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labour Organization (ILO) Joint Estimates of Work-related Burden of the Disease and Injury report to see how detrimental long working hours can be to a person’s health. Exposure to long working hours was the biggest contributor to attributable deaths by occupational risk factor. Despite knowing this, we continue to hear about organisations that expect and demand their employees to work long hours to help the company and protect their roles.
In the UK we have the Working Time Directive, which is designed to ensure that ‘workers over 18 can't work more than 48 hours’ (averaged over a 17-week period).
Although UK law specifies that workers under 18 cannot work more than 40 hours per week on average, can the system still be manipulated? What about the office workers that go ‘over and above’ for their employer, arriving in work an hour or two early and finishing an hour or two later than normal each day to ensure everything is running smoothly.
From my experience these hours aren’t always recorded and instead they are noted down as nine-to-five hours; it’s more the operatives inside the factories that have their data captured. You could say the same for the workers on construction sites, working those extra weekend shifts ‘off the books’.
Recently, Elon Musk was reported saying that he expects his workers to ‘work long hours at high intensity’ or leave. Attitudes like this raise questions around how working hours are managed and what more can be done to ensure that workers aren’t unwillingly doing more than what is legally required.
I have already mentioned the term ‘over and above’ before. ‘Discretionary effort’ is a turn of phrase that organisations use to praise workers, but is it also an expectation placed on workers to ‘do that bit extra’ and work those longer hours? The positive promotion of ‘discretionary effort’ is another phrase that can also make workers feel obliged to work longer hours to demonstrate their commitment to the organisation.
Language is powerful and the message, praise and in some cases reward for going ‘over and above’ could also have severe implications for workers. Exposure to long working hours has been linked with health risks. The WHO/ILO report highlights strokes and ischaemic heart disease as second and third on the list of the total number of attributable deaths by occupational risk factor and health outcome.
Not only do organisations run the risk of damaging their workers’ physical health by expecting long working hours, but they can also affect their mental health. Going ‘over and above’ or working long hours under high intensity runs the risk of ‘bursting people’, a point that workers reach when they can no longer handle the pressure of their day-to-day duties. When this happens, however, it impacts on an organisation’s top line and ultimately their profits because workers often go off sick due to the added strain they are under.
I’d ask you to reflect on your own organisation. Do you believe that all working hours are captured correctly? Is there more we can do as OSH professionals to assist with the Working Time Directive to ensure everything is captured? Finally, if you commonly use the term ‘over and above’ just consider the impact that it may have on your workers and also the wider implications.
