How to resist the culture of putting in extra at work

[Outofideas79]

I've worked where I do for 9 years. In that whole time there has been a culture of putting in more than your hours. I'm not talking a little bit more, lots. We don't get paid overtime, but can claim it as Toil. I currently have 150 hours of toil, which I basically cannot take and the 'acceptable' is to only claim that for actual attendance at evening or weekend events. Not for those hours you work around working hours in the office or at home. I work part time so all of the above is particularly challenging.

As a middle manager, the expectation is that you put in more as a minimum. This was vocalised by the CEO some years ago. And key members of staff are very vocal about how much extra they work, always making a point about how early they have been in, much extra they worked in the evening or at the weekend, so the pressure is always there.

I've frankly got to the point where I'm exhausted. I have a young child and am a single parent. Financially due to part time hours, I cannot afford wrap, and am unwilling to pay for it when the organisation refuse to pay me or support me for the extra time I put in, despite constantly giving me more work to do. Last week I worked an extra 13 hours, around my daughters bedtime etc. I've raised the issue around extra work and fought for full time hours on the basis of the extra work, but this has been consistently refused. How can I start to put in respectful boundaries in an organisation where it is assumed you will just put the hours in to get something done?

@bluepurpleangel I'm working on getting a new job. But also worried about jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

@GOODCAT Concerns consistently vocalised, both through conversations and emails, and more formally through mid and end of year reviews. So it's logged. And it's not just me either.

Well, that’s your first mistake. We all need to stop accepting it as the norm. This is not a Europe wide problem, it is a UK problem, where we are bullied by organisations who are taking advantage of us whilst lining their pockets. I am a teacher, I work my contracted hours and not a second more. Others have followed suit, and it’s all worked out really well for us all. I think if we all stop accepting this illegal practice of not paying employees for their time, we will all be able to reclaim our lives.

@MollyMarples I suppose that's the question I'm asking really, because after pulling all these extra hours last week, to deliver what I needed to, I was still accused of not pulling my weight. So how on earth do I do it without being accused that I'm not doing my job properly?

Generally though if you're paid £XX per hour - you do your hours and go home. If you're paid £XXXXX per year you work until the job is done. A senior professional role comes with responsibilities but also privileges.
If it's not working for you then you need, as others have said, address it with management (or a union if appropriate), or accept it's not the right role for you.

My calculator says you earn £17.95 an hour if you work 22.5 hours a week.
if you work an extra free 13 hours that drops to £11.37 per hour, and obviously drops to less if you do more than 13 extra hours a week.

would your plumber or electrician give you an extra 13 hours for free ? Cos I’d like their number please as that would be wonderful indeed.

@isthewashingdryyet that outs it into stark figures. And actually I don't know why I'd never thought to do this before.

My union advised me to do the same, a long while ago. I trained hard, passed lots of exams and have years of experience. That has value.

I may give a maximum of one extra hour a day, but no more. I have value. And I am amazed you don’t have a massive health and well-being culture of getting work life balance right in a government job.

And to the poster who said a salary suggests you do all the hours to get the job done, that might apply on a six figure salary, but not a pro rota £35k a year job.
Extra hours still have to guarantee a decent hourly rate, that values education, training and experience.

By the way I'm also thinking of leaving my job because I am doing so many extra hours - including logging on on my days off for a couple of hours "just to check emails". I accept though that I'll likely lose some of my perks when I do leave.

While we have a complaints culture though and a balance sheet culture and a price sensitive approach this is unlikely to change much. As consumers we "raise a formal complaint" if we think someone has been a bit too quick or not thorough enough or hasn't answered our emails or got back to us when they said they would. If an employee uses the wrong tone, a delivery driver is late, a teacher tells our child off or a nurse is a bit brusque, we take issue with it - and "escalate it". That takes time and money to deal with.

We don't want to pay for service if we can get something cheaper we will. And businesses fire their directors if the figures don't look good or close down.

But your situation seems particularly bad OP - so I wish you luck.

The main issue (as I see it) is that some of you when you try to stick to a boundary are then indirectly or directly criticised/blamed for increasing the workload of your colleagues.

I work 13 hour shifts as a community nurse. I found myself doing more and more in a previous similar role - hours and hours of overtime, some paid, some not. I’m in a different team now. I quietly take my unpaid hour’s break - it’s in my diary and it stays there. For me once one boundary gets eroded (e.g. working through lunch) so do others - going in early, logging on at home, leaving later)

I’ve stopped all of it…I deal with one patient at a time and then switch off (unless there was a genuine emergency of course). Interestingly now I have my time off I realise how stressed I was.

For most of us the work will always be there. We (imo) become part of the problem if we are all putting in extra hours etc. OP if you and 2 other people did 13 hours extra last week that means your organisation got more than one full time ‘extra’ person for free (39 hours in total). But I think we constantly justify it as ‘only an hour or two here and there’.

You are working for free

or to roll that into your pay
Say you work 1 hour over time a week
Thats 48 hours work or 6.8 days where you work for free.
Or for the extra day per every thousand you get paid you give yourself a pay cut 1000/266.8×260 =974

The key employees are (should be) getting bonuses from your free labour. The company profits and they get paid directly in salary or in company share buyins

What discounts do your job give their clients?
Are they below cost selling?
Because you are.

Once you get your head around that you need to be ruthless with how you manage your time.
You keep loging your time.
In say 15 min blocks.
split it into tasks and rank from essential to busy work.
Bring it to your manager and explain they need to assign some tasks to other people.
If your manager pushes back say that you are Outofideas79 LTD and dont do client discounts.

You have to be able to work out your projected workflows as early as possible and work out when you will over run your hours.

And emails if you can get your manager to agree have a rule that you dont read circulars about other peoples work

You just don't do it. Make sure you're in a union. You can just say no. If there is more work than is reasonable in your hours, raise that to your manager, that is their responsibility to deal with by flagging risks and deciding what to do about those risks. They should think about auditing productivity and accurately job planning so that they know what staffing they actually need to complete the work, and think about ways to do things more efficiently.

If you need a reason to say no, you say you have appointments/ childcare duties etc. But you can just say no.

I work in management and do not work unpaid overtime-why would you?

And to those saying it's the norm, norms and cultures are not fixed-they can be changed. And one way to look at it is to consider your hourly rate as a PP has said: when you calculate your actual hourly rate when you add in all those extra hours, are you even earning well? I once did this in a previous role and realised I was basically earning minimum wage with the hours I was putting in, so I found another job.

I'm public sector (government ALB) at a similar level as you, and this is not the norm in my organisation. I do do extra hours from time to time, but it is not expected, and if my flexi goes over a certain level, my manager flags it and I have to take some time off. It's your management that are the issue here.

My team also has more work than people to do the work, but we are not expected to work ourselves into the ground to try to do it all, because that would be impossible. This was hard won after fighting a culture something like you describe, but now our managers push back on our behalf. Stressed, overworked people does not equal quality output, and it's for management to choose which one of those they want. It sounds like yours are choosing the former, and why would anyone want to work somewhere like that? I'd be looking for another job.

I did this, extra hours missed my daughters extra activities etc. Had to beg my mum to keep her longer etc. I still got made redundant, don't be me!.

Another one here who thought you were going to say 80k, absolutely unacceptable for a 35k job.
If I'm honest OP, there is no way of doing this (unless your immediate management are supportive) without getting a bit sharp, but really your end goal is leaving right? So what you can do is cover your back in terms of the law, and by that I mean evidence in case they decide to performance manage you out. Although seems unlikely if EVERYONE is overloaded, it's worth doing.

So with that in mind, here is what I would do:

• Start asking very specific questions about how long it takes your peers to complete tasks with your manager. Where is the benchmarking, how is resourcing done, how do they backfill positions - time is money, so they must know' how much time certain tasks roughly take. If they don't, you need to record how long it takes you to do tasks and then ask them to confirm IN WRITING if this is around expected levels. Then you will have a response from them IN WRITING how long they expect things to take. Then you can work on the below. They can't accuse you of not pulling your weight if they cannot get specific about expectations around time spent on the workload. It needs to be down to the TASK, not just 'get it done'. You need to ask very clearly and get a response, and if they don't give you a response in writing, you send a summary of the conversation afterwards with the SPECIFICS laid out as a 'just to confirm what we talked about' email.

• Start getting very specific about your workload and time is takes to do tasks.

So 'I have 5 x Task A this week, as well as 3 x Task B, those will all take me XXX amount of time, I also have tasks C and D to do which take XXX hours - that adds up to XXX hours which is well over my hours. Which task would you advise I pass over to a colleague or push to next week?' Manager says 'we don't have capacity, get it done' You say 'I have allowed for the fact that I will work XXX additional time(10% of your contracted hours, max) but that still won't cover it, what do you suggest' Manager 'just get it done' You: okay. Then you send an email saying 'just to confirm, I have raised Xxx (include all the detail above) then finish with 'this will result in me working Xx hours additional, which is an additional % on top of my contracted weekly hours of xxx'

If Manager questions it, you just say 'I was just confirming what we talked about' and/or 'I'm just keeping track of my hours so that in case the opportunity to increase my hours to fulltime arises, we have evidence'
If they tell you to stop, don't. You are within your rights to send a summary of any 121 conversations. No, it's not overly friendly, but a DECENT Manager would recognise that you as an individual need to cover your back, it's not personal against them. If they aren't decent well, who cares. You won't have to put up with them forever as you are looking for a new job anyway, and they will QUICKLY realise that you are doing this to cover your back and hopefully either back off, or start writing things up themselves to counter. However, no employment tribunal is going to rule that 13 extra hours on top of part time work for 35k is in any way a reasonable expectation, despite the TOIL element.

ANY discussions on workload or performance, you write that up with detail and email it to them 'just to confirm....'

Also while you are there, start taking notes on the 'culture' - what conversations, emails do you witness where its either states or implied that the TOIL can only be taken back in form of work events etc? Again, no tribunal would deem that reasonable.

It's extra work on top of your workload, but it has the enefit of making you feel NOT CRAZY, because I worked in a place like this and you end up feeling like you are the problem. You are NOT the problem. There are PLENTY of jobs out there that wouldn't expect this, and plenty of jobs that might expect this but will at least let you take TOIL properly!! Wishing you the best.

13 extra hours when you work part time is insane. If you don't already belong, definitely join a union and discuss with others if there's enough interest to push for your workplace to be unionised. It makes a massive difference, having been involved in unionising a workplace. If this doesn't work I'd be jobhunting elsewhere.

You could get a higher paid job elsewhere with no management required, I get paid £50k at a university - no line management and no expectation to do extra hours.

I worked for an organisation which slowly reduced the number of staff over the course of several years. We went from a team of about 14 full time down to about 4. Reasons for this were unknown, but we suspected it was part financial mismanagement and part of a general money saving culture. The workload did reduce over that time period very very slightly, but certainly not by the same factor of the staff reduction! I ended up doing about 3.5 people's jobs. I decided in order to emerge from the situation with my mental health intact I needed to put in place some serious boundaries....these were:

• Only doing overtime if it benefitted me directly. For example, if I was taking on a new project and getting familiar with everything, it was worth doing the extra work in order to save hassle later on. It is easier spending more time on a project in the early stages when things are quiet than trying to "catch up" when things are in full swing.

• If something can be resolved by an email then do that. Some clients we worked with loved meetings to seemingly justify their existence. These waste time as issues are only discussed, never actioned in a meeting.

• If there was something "mission critical" that would affect business continuity (or the missed deadline would be of great detriment to my personal reputation), then I would do the overtime. In reality these type of scenarios only cropped up very rarely.

• If anyone internal questioned why xyz wasn't progressing, then I would tell them straight i.e. we have no staff and it will get done when it gets done". If clients questioned, then they were told various things depending on how important the relationship was.

• Ruthless prioritising and tracking of tasks. Then working on those tasks with laser focus and not getting distracted by other issues "kicking off" in my inbox. Sometimes easier said than done.

I would then log on at 9am and finish at 5pm. I would also take 1 hour for lunch.

Thankfully my direct manager understood the horrendous situation and was supportive. I imagine trying to implement the above boundaries if the culture is "overtime for all" would be much more difficult.

What kind of tasks are you working on during your overtime? Is it just general everyday tasks, or things which need doing or everything falls apart?

@6strings1song the times I work overtime generally sit withing the boundaries of what you specified. So if something will fail of those things are not done or my professional reputation would be threatened. Last week we had an event to deliver, so the things that needed doing had a strict, immovable deadline.

OP, do you work with a lot of people who are on much higher salaries?

It can be an issue when you are on a modest salary that doesn't justify working 'round the clock' but others you work with are on the kind of £100k + salary where that can be reasonably expected. They expect you to be around when they are without considering that you're not really being paid enough to do that.

The only thing you can do is to set firm boundaries and manage expectations - 'I'll get back to you on that by midday tomorrow' rather than staying late to do it. Decline meetings (with alternative time proposal) that are outside your hours.

If there is a genuine 'all hands on deck' emergency, take the TOIL as soon as you can afterwards rather than accruing lots of it.

I work in the civil service - my office is basically a ghost town by about 5.10 pm. Only senior managers are expected to do anything over their contracted hours.

OP, it sounds like the unpaid overtime culture is very entrenched where you work, so would take a lot of bravery and assertiveness to challenge. I think quiet quitting followed by a change of job (I'd go public sector) might be the safer option.

Its part of the deal in a well paid job its why many people work in a less well paying job when they have kids or in later life

If you don’t want to do it maybe look for a job at a council??