Models leave things out. If they don’t, they aren’t models.
As an example, so far as I can tell economists leave the asymmetries wealth imposes on political and social power out of their models (although I know far too little about economics to say this with any certainty).
And so, for example, to an economist labor unions and other cartels distort marketplaces and are therefore distressing. Businesses, in contrast, do not represent an employment-supply cartel because employees can, in theory, shop for a better job in the same frictionless fashion that employers can shop for new employees.
It’s the model thing — a pretty theory that ignores an important practicality — the balance of power.
Employers, can, for example, uh … encourage … exempt employees to work more than 40 hours per week with no additional compensation. They apparently can, in fact, require any number of hours, so long as it doesn’t exceed 960, and that only because there aren’t any more.
Employers get immediate, tangible advantages from this (higher “productivity” as it’s usually measured). Sure there are trade-offs, like poorer quality and loss of the best talent, but they’re delayed and indirect. They can be lethal, but they aren’t lethal right now, and as any behavioral scientist knows, delayed feedback is ineffective feedback.
For the employee the disadvantages are immediate, tangible, and too obvious to bother listing. Often there are no delayed advantages either: Many employers act as though these extra, free work hours are an entitlement and not an investment employees make in their careers.
Nor can these employees shop for a better job as easily as their employers can shop for replacements, because they don’t have the time. They’re donating that to their current employer. Most don’t have the financial cushion, either. If an employee leaves, their employer can distribute their work among the remaining employees, but the employee will have to spend retirement savings to pay the bills.
It isn’t a subtle point: The employer has more power than the employee. Duh.
I’ve received quite a bit of correspondence over the years from IT professionals who find themselves trapped in this situation. Unsurprisingly, it seems to correlate with the employer’s size.
Here’s a particularly sad example: The executive sponsor of a very large application development effort in a Fortune 100 company was explicit about these “not being 40-hour-a-week jobs,” but was very hard to pin down on just how many hours a week the jobs were.
The result: Two funerals, millions of dollars and opportunity costs spent, large executive bonuses for holding employees’ feet to the fire, and my correspondent, among many others, laid off, all for a project that eventually failed.
How to turn this trend toward increasingly unhealthy workplaces around?
If you’re on the employer side of the equation, do what you can to take the long view. Healthy workplaces really do result in higher profits … not quarter by quarter, but they do.
Also: Make it official that you hire only the best, never settling for good enough. The best are at least ten times more effective than the average, at far less than ten times the cost. Hiring only the best is a brilliant financial investment.
And, managers who hire only the best generally remember how hard it is to attract and recruit them, and so are less likely to create working conditions that drive them away.
If you’re an employee?
First: Choose a career path for which you are one of the best. Employees might be easy to replace, but the best employees are always scarce, by definition.
Second: Don’t bother trying to persuade management that healthier workplaces are more profitable workplaces. If you’re working in a toxic environment, nobody in a position to do something about cares anything about it.
Third: Daydream about getting your revenge if you like, but don’t actually try to get it. You won’t, and anything you do to try to get it will end up putting you on the street (you work for an at-will employer after all) and making you so toxic you’ll stay on the street.
And fourth: No matter how hard it is, build a financial cushion. From now until the day you retire, figure you’ll spend a quarter of your career between jobs, so salt enough away when you have one to cover your expenses when you don’t.
If it helps, don’t think of this as a reduction in your lifestyle.
Think of it as an investment in the economics of power.
The problem with employers hiring only the best is that it seems to translate into “purple squirrel” jobs.
I see job advertisements for “purple squirrels” every day.
A typical job advertisement in IT requires you to be a Cisco engineer, a Windows engineer, a Email engineer, a Virtalization engineer, Cloud, knowledge of multiple mobile phone platforms and on and on. Or some variant of the above.
The definition of a “best employee” seems to be someone who can do multiple jobs. When I see this I immediately think 60+ hours a week. What employers seem to want pay a “best employee” is usually substandard.
My sister-in-law, a CISSP, encountered an employer who required a CISSP fresh out of college (so they wouldn’t be “set in their ways”). Since the certification requires 5 years of real experience, I don’t know how successful they have been.
I don’t know about your place but in my neck of the woods the weeks are limited to 168 hours (24×7) but they do seem a lot longer at times.
You don’t have to multitask, then?
Excellent advice, except everybody can’t hire the best. Even if you exclude the purple squirrels, there are fewer people who are ‘the best’ than there are positions to fill. And any population of reasonable size starts to look like a bell curve. However, everyone can certainly aspire to perform at a level that matches or exceeds the organization’s investment (salary, benefits, management time, etc.) so, short of an across the board downsizing, it becomes more trouble than it’s worth to try to initiate a termination. (Most large organizations have HR depts that, while they may be ineffectual in dealing with toxic environments, also make it harder for managers to capriously terminate people.) Some good old fashion cooperative action might work as well – if everyone on the team agrees to certain limits, and sticks with it, it may be impossible for the leader to anything. (Terminate the whole group for insubordination?) In addition to having money in the bank, make sure you know your organization’s termination and layoff policies, and your options under those policies.
Not everyone will try to hire the best either, which makes it a bit easier. Also, different hiring managers define “best” differently. And, while not everyone can be in the top 10% of a randomly chosen career path, most people can excel at something. If more people concentrated on finding careers where they’re at their strongest, I think we’d find that a far bigger number than 10% of the workforce is in the top 10% of their chosen path.
You’re right on the money!
Hi Bob,
Once again, your column is full of great insight and even better advice. The last item, about building a financial cushion, is of utmost importance. Having been downsized multiple times in my career, I can assure anyone that this is something that should be given a very high priority, especially the higher on the corporate ladder you are, as a lot of companies try to cut the big bucks first. Thanks for keeping the great columns coming.