Brigid Schulte.Tessa Bowman/Supplied
When pandemic lockdowns hit in March, 2020, few anticipated that the intense disruptions to work would persist 4½ years later.
This fall, a tug of war continues over where, when and how people do their work, with employers seeking more face time back in the office. Earlier this month, the U.K. arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers announced it would begin location tracking its 26,000 employees by January in a bid to rein in working from home. PwC’s approach follows similar moves at Google, which started weighing attendance on its performance reviews last year.
Workers are pushing back. Many are clinging to their hybrid hours, finding them more productive and conducive to work-life balance. The labour reckoning brought with it quiet quitting and an exodus of staff from inflexible employers; job postings dangling hybrid hours rose fivefold between 2019 and 2023 in Canada. Right-to-disconnect policies limiting after-hours work communication proliferated, as did worker uprisings in health care, gig work and other fields.
“The pandemic triggered a power struggle over work that will likely take years to resolve,” author Brigid Schulte writes in her new book, Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life – a clarion call for more humane ways of working.
Schulte, a former Washington Post journalist, argues that we rely on outdated and dysfunctional stories telling us that long hours are synonymous with good work. Not so, the OECD finds: Dividing countries’ GDPs by time spent working reveals that longer hours do not yield more productivity. And yet the social pressure to toil this way continues, robbing people of time for family, friends, community and leisure.
Schulte believes the way we work is a choice. She dives into promising case studies of people doing work differently. Many are doing so in countries that have developed guardrails – legislation limiting work hours, paid family leave policies, affordable child care and newer “well-being economies.” She spoke with The Globe and Mail.
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Your reporting found leaders learning to trust their staff but also old-school bosses who need control. You found companies scheduling fewer meetings, prioritizing higher-value work over long hours of office “busyness.” In these workplaces, morale, engagement and productivity went up. Inevitably, a new CEO would arrive, kill the pilot and return to the old ways. Why?
Work redesign rises and falls largely based on the mindset of the leader and what they choose to believe. If they believe this in-person, always-on, intensive overwork culture is the way people should work, they’ll kill anything else – despite the evidence on productivity.
Today, surveillance is coming back into play, with companies counting badge swipes and tracking people. It shows how we’re still in this very unsettled place.
You propose that many CEOs may not see the value of flex time because they haven’t experienced the daily juggle of paid work, child care, elder care, family scheduling, unending housework. How to bridge this divide?
We tend to think of care responsibilities as falling primarily on women. So we allowed flexibility for women, which then became the “mommy track.” Flexibility became stigmatized as feminized and for a lesser worker. But a Harvard Business School survey found three-fourths of all workers had some form of care responsibility – across genders. Particularly after COVID, when so many more men were at home, they can’t unsee just how much work it is, all this unpaid labour. As care becomes more humanized and normalized, you’ll start seeing more pressure at work.
You report on hourly, low-wage workers, who have far less control over their schedules than white-collar workers. Research finds “time strain” has twice the negative impact on people as wages. Why?
This was a revelation: Chaotic or disorganized time is more stressful than income volatility. You wake up in the morning and don’t know if you’re going to work or how many hours you’ll work. You get your schedule just a few days in advance, and it’s not anything like last week. Can you take your kid or your mother to the doctor? Can you do the parent-teacher conference? Your time is not your own, and really, your life is not your own. You’re in a constant, vigilant state of waiting to go to work. Research shows that’s so terrible for human beings – their health, well-being and families. It’s also bad for business.
You contrast Japan’s work culture – labour lawyers estimate that karoshi, or “death from overwork,” claims 10,000 lives a year through suicide or illness – to Iceland, where the majority now work shortened hours. Some people take half of Fridays off, others work 40 minutes less a day. How did Iceland change its culture?
What changed and enabled them to rethink their entire approach to work was catastrophe, when their entire country went bankrupt during the global banking crisis in 2008. People lost faith in the old system and the leaders.
That created an opening for a reimagining. What are we doing? What is the purpose of a nation, and how do we decide if we’re successful? Iceland began this pioneering well-being economy government movement. The success of a country should be the health of its people. It shifted their orientation toward quality of life and created this opening to change the way they work.
They’re small and homogeneous enough that they could do this. There was a single mom who went back to work and was much more productive in shorter hours – because she had to be. She wondered: Why couldn’t everybody do this? She called her friend on city council in Reykjavik, and they tried a short-work-hours pilot with city workers. It was successful, they shared the results widely, and the entire country tried it. Unions began negotiating over it. Shortened workweeks are now available to 85 per cent of workers across the socioeconomic spectrum.
I wanted to know: How is it possible to do the same amount of work, at the same rate of pay, in less time? Everybody had to do it in a different way because their work and organizational cultures are different. There was no one fix. But it’s not about less work. It’s about better work that enables us to live a better life.
You urge finding an “enlarged sense of meaning,” beyond the meaning we derive from paid work. Time-use surveys find our volunteer hours are down drastically, as is time with friends. How did we get here?
How we got here is the story that long work hours are what lead to excellent work. It’s a story of the powerful that has driven the rest of us right off the cliff. We’ve created this treadmill of long work that doesn’t lead to more time or stability.
The question now is, how do we reclaim our private time? That’s what’s behind the right-to-disconnect laws. Workers have seen something different, even when we’re just talking about return-to-office tensions.
Things can change when people share their stories and realize these ways of work aren’t working. These are not individual failings. We can ask for and expect something different from our private organizations, leaders and public policy. It’s time for a new story of work.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.