Never Not Working
Why the Always-On Culture Is Bad for Business--and How to Fix It
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The always-on, hustle culture creates an unhealthy, counterproductive relationship with work.
Many workers believe that to compete with other top talent, they must embrace a culture that rewards long hours and a constant connection to work. Businesses and society endorse busyness, overwork, and extreme commitment as the most valued traits in workers. Sometimes that endorsement is explicit, as when Elon Musk told X/Twitter employees to work "long hours at high intensity" or get fired. More often it's an implicit contract, a buildup of organizational and cultural norms and the adoption of new technologies that make it easy to tether people to work.
Either way, this workaholic behavior is unhealthy and counterproductive for workers and for organizations. It's time to fight back. Malissa Clark—a preeminent researcher on the culture of overwork—shows you how in Never Not Working. Clark examines overwork and burnout, not just from the individual's perspective but from an organizational perspective too. She delivers a comprehensive, nuanced definition of workaholism, busting myths along the way—working long hours, it turns out, doesn't automatically make you a workaholic. She also helps you assess whether you're falling prey to the phenomenon and whether you're creating workaholics in your organization.
Clark shows you how to escape the trap of putting work at the center of everything and thus losing your well-being—or your company's performance—in the process. Deeply researched and written for everyone from leaders to individual contributors, Never Not Working is the essential guide to identifying workaholism in yourself and others and starting on the road to recovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Workaholism is a "more pervasive problem than ever," according to this simplistic debut study. Clark, an organizational psychology professor at the University of Georgia, traces how the commodification of time during the Industrial Revolution subjected employees to ever increasing workloads that reshaped the average person's schedule and led to expectations for workers to prioritize "the interests of their employer over their own." Surveying the toll of contemporary overworking, Clark notes studies finding that workaholics are more depressed than their colleagues, whom they often stress out by setting unrealistic expectations. She suggests readers might develop a healthier relationship with work by including personal needs ("eat a healthy snack"; "sleep") on to-do lists and taking up a hobby to redirect the compulsion to keep busy. However, Clark contends such individual-centric fixes are merely "coping" and that ending employee burnout requires organizational change. Unfortunately, she doesn't offer much support for her assertion that workaholism reduces productivity, and her focus on the health benefits enjoyed by employees with more downtime does little to address the profit motive's role in driving companies to overwork employees. As a result, her recommendations for employers to "decrease work intensity and reset expectations on timelines" come across as naive. This biting look at the costs of overwork is unlikely to move the needle.
