The ‘who is the most overworked’ competition

[Busybusybusy88]

I’m talking about in a work context. If a colleague repeatedly tells you how many hours they’re working, ‘I worked til the early hours all this week’ but you haven’t (maybe an hour later if needed to finish things off) - does it make you feel guilty, or do you just think they are unable to manage their time?

No matter where I work (currently large corporate, all working from home, no set hours as such, just get the work done!) I always seem to come across colleagues who insist on telling everyone how hard they are working, how over worked they are. Being online during their annual leave because they’re just so busy. Sending you emails at midnight when they could have written it, saved it and pressed send at 8am as it’s not like anyone will reply before then anyway.

Particularly if they are someone fairly senior, I think it can be damaging for more junior/younger colleagues who feel that’s the expectation.

AIBU?

@MessAllOver

I work late at night and early morning because I'm often doing childcare during the day. Repeated nursery closures this year have left me with no other option.

I get that, but would you moan about it to colleagues who have been working all day as normal?

I have no issue with people working flexible hours to suit their commitments - but surely if we have flexible hours cultures then someone working at midnight is just their choice ans shouldn’t be something they feel the need to go on about to other colleagues? It’s either fine or it’s not!!

Dreading, I totally disagree with you from my own experience but it's probably different in different jobs and different workplaces. I’m an NHS salaried GP and I would say that my bosses have no issue whatsoever with my heading home on the dot of the hour I finish work as long as everything is done. Getting the job done is everything and looking busy counts for nothing. In fact I get criticised if I stay late at work or log on to catch up on admin on days off, there is an attitude of “why are you here, this is terrible for your mental health, you need to have a good work-life balance”. The people at the top wouldn’t dream of working over their designated hours.

Which is all well and good and I guess I’d rather that attitude than one where the people at the top are doing this all the time and expect you to have no life. However it has to be backed up by a reasonable workload. When you are constantly given more work to do than you can possibly get done in the time available for actual work hours it tends to feel a bit like gaslighting. Particularly when you raise the issue and are simply told you must be inefficient if you don’t get through the work by home time. And particularly when it is these people in charge who are dumping much of their workload onto you and then saying “how can you be struggling with your workload when I’m not...”.

The other thing that drives me up the wall is in a job like mine, success being essentially measured by how quickly you get patients in and out of the door like a conveyor belt in a factory, rather than what have you actually achieved in your time with the patient in terms of helping them with their health issues. When I started out in medicine a huge part of how respected you were by colleagues was how good a doctor you were basically (and a big part of that was getting patients on side and feeling confident in your care etc), now it’s purely about how fast you are and it doesn’t seem to matter if you have spent so little time with someone that they literally call back the next day to say they didn’t really understand what was said and didn’t have time to ask questions and basically we now have to do the consultation all over again. It’s a false efficiency really in my eyes but nobody is measuring that (the patients notice but you’ll find that the doctors they really value, like me, because we take time to listen etc, are constantly being pushed around by top management who just want us to work faster).

@rachelbloomfan I expect your experience is part reason why our local GP surgeries are unable to get long term GPs now. It's constantly understaffed and no one stays. It used to be quality care with doctors who knew you and your families. It's a shame the expectations have changed that the patients are shoved quickly through quickly. Neither the patients or doctors benefit from that. The workload should be split between more doctors and then patients are happy and the doctors get a good home/work balance.

but it’s quite soul destroying to log off at 6, only to log back in at 8am the next day to a full inbox of emails someone has fired off at midnight!!

Yeah I get your point. (I don't tend to work out of hours but sometimes something will pop into my head as I'm going to bed and will fire off an email before I forget).

I did once have an awful boss who was the absolute worse about presenteism. Anyone who had a day off sick would come back to loads of snide comments implying they'd be skiving - even though most of the time they'd done a full day work from home and had been answering messages on the internal messenging system etc. There was a massive pressure to submit large quantiities of often poor quality work, that had to be redone eventually, to prove you were working hard. Actually it would have been far more efficient if people had taken the time to complete the work to a higher standard, if more slowly.