If you’re in a high paying/successful career, do you work over your hours?

[Bilingualistic]

I worked way over my hours before I had my DD, now I’m doing drop offs and pick ups (she’s 3) and I just don’t have the spare time to give. I’m in a well paid (for my area) job, earning 50k but I can see that eyes follow me when I leave the office on time (I work 8:30-4:30). I think it’s going to get worse when she starts school.

I worry that if I want to progress further I need to start giving more of my time (which I really don’t have alongside doing a postgrad in my spare time).

In my experience, senior leaders work well above their contracted hours as standard. Do I need to sacrifice time with DD to get there? What’s your experience?

Yes, whenever needed.

But I try not to make it consistent and try to keep it invisible.

I’m happy to do it, but it shouldn’t be expected.

Me too. In quieter times, I will take a long lunch, do a slightly later exercise class (8:15 instead of 7am) or get my nails done, knowing that when things get busy again I will barely have time to eat. Flexibility on behalf of the employee is a big factor as to why my profession is well-paid.

No. I do a 4 day week. But have a side job (I’m elected chair a committee so there’s local / community/ councillor stuff to do).
Today I finished 1 to do a faith network afternoon, I will log on tomorrow just so I’m not taking the piss as I’ve probably not worked my shift this week. I also know my job is nothing to do with being at a desk 9-5.
I do close my laptop at 5 every day, and don’t look at work over the weekend.

I used to. I went from a public sector job that I’d had since graduating to a better paid one in the private sector, and I felt so insecure about that move that I said yes to everything and thought I had to go above and beyond to be successful. Then I had DD, and then quickly after that was diagnosed with cancer, and spent my whole mat leave ruminating in the chemo suite about how I needed to make some changes in my life.

I changed companies after being back in my old job after mat/sick leave for a year. DD is 3 now. I got a pay rise from moving, and now I earn six figures and only work over my contracted hours when there’s a truly urgent business need. I do keep an eye on my emails and teams but I have flexibility as to when I do my actual work and I’m treated like an adult. I just came back from a week family holiday where I uninstalled Outlook so I couldn’t check it - and I knew I could do that because our VPs model that behaviour. I wouldn’t have dreamed of that before. We aren’t handling the nuclear codes, someone can cover any of us while we relax with our family.

I honestly don’t think I’d have had the confidence to step away from how I had been working had I not got ill. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone but it did do me a favour in terms of how much bullshit I was willing to tolerate in the pursuit of making rich people richer 😵‍💫

I work way over my hours plus weekends (software releases which need to go in quiet times) plus may get a call in the night if there is a major issue. Good money though so I am not complaining.

Yes, I'm a business owner however myself and my employees often work behind our hours. We are a deadline based industry and deadlines missed often carry financial penalties so we need to meet them.

Our PAs / Reception / Support staff do not however.

NHS ...have always worked over my hours. It's impossible to get the job done in working hours. If I stuck to them we d fail. I can't standby and watch that.

My team don't work over their hours. They get paid considerably less than me for that right. If the service fails it's my reputation.

Building my career I always worked over. However when I had small people to look after I didn't career build or have a high paying job. Its the invisible child 'tax' IMO

Nope. Never have. Do accounts, only do my hours, don't even do that actually.

Not massively well paid - under six figures but way above higher tax threshold. I no longer work over my hours and am completely stagnating. I've sacrificed much better jobs for the flex I'm allowed here and have resigned myself to those for the next few years.

It’s expected in my role. You just need to get the work done and meet any deadlines. Means that when I’m busy with tight deadlines, I have to work after DC go to bed or DH picks up more of the load so I work in the office late, and vice versa when he’s busy.

We both earn well though and it’s very much the nature of our job. Equally, when it’s quiet, it’s relaxed and I barely do anything. This week, I had two days where I did just a couple of hours of chargeable work a day which meant I logged on late, took longer lunches and logged off earlier.

I earn almost 100k and I don’t work over my contracted hours. I don’t let my team do it either. I would (and have) if there is a crisis but it’s so easy to cover up resource issues by working longer as the norm.

I worked in public sector senior roles for a long time and I found that was the worst for work life balance/needing to work longer. That was because the jobs were designed in a way that it wasn’t possible to do them in 36 hours a week, so working longer had to be the norm and there were constant crises because of more senior folk’s working practices. Constantly running people into the ground and then wondering why there were such big sickness levels.

Never have and never will when I am an employee.

I also work freelance though and it is a different matter. I work as many hours as I can :) and sometimes weekends but of course charge the clients for all this.

Basically I would never do unpaid hours.

What role and industry do you work in? Are you committed to staying in your industry, or would you consider a move? How far up the ladder do you foresee yourself ever wanting to climb in terms of level of responsibility? There are sectors and industries where seniority comes with a lot more flexibility than others, where the flexibility can work in your favour even if you do sometimes have to work beyond contract hours; and levels of seniority where you aren’t quite so integral to the big decisions that you always need to be on hand in the making them.

Wanting to always be able to do school pick up and drop off will rule you out for senior roles in some industries, there’s no point pretending it won’t, because if it’s a deadline-heavy function, or your company is global and there’s an expectation that you can work alongside colleagues in different timezones at least some of the time, there simply can’t be a 9-5 cut off for those roles or an ability to block out fixed times. But, like my role and those several other posters have spoken about, there is often the payoff of quieter times where the company takes the view that you can take the time back at your leisure.

Several posters have mentioned working beyond contract hours as “working for free”, but that’s entirely industry dependent: many industries operate bonus structures which ultimately mean that working out of hours to business need to meet or exceed targets is remunerated via a bonus. Did I enjoy joining a Teams call with Bermuda at 10pm last night? Not really, but being able to push our current big acquisition through by quarter end will mean the time won’t be unpaid, because it means my year-end bonus will be awarded.

Yes, I am regularly in early and the last to leave. I do also do a few hours work on the weekends. As a pp said, there is just too much to do. I am very senior in my role. My kids are teens now but when they were young like your DD I left on time and tolerated the side eyes. I think it probably did slow my progression but it couldn't be helped. It very much helped that my boss at the time understood.

I’m in the civil service and no I don’t. I used to work flexi so I claimed back any time owed, now I compress my hours which much of our senior civil servants do which is a clever way of ensuring 1 day back a week or every 2 weeks depending on how you do it, SCS isn’t allowed flexi so it’s a good way of making sure you don’t work too much for free!

And as a civil servant no outcome based bonuses here so definitely not working beyond what I am scheduled to work. If you work over your hours in the public sector you just get taken advantage of, you get more on your plate, it’s really important to push back and remind budget holders what they have actually financially budgeted for, if you don’t have enough hours in the day for the projects set, they haven’t resourced them appropriately and it is not on the workers’ mental and physical health to remedy that.

I’m sure it’s very different working in a profit based industry where as Comtesse says those hours can be rewarded less directly than purely ‘hourly wage’

Sometimes but I work for a consultancy where we bill all our hours so overtime is paid

Yes. Leave at 5-6, work evenings. Have done since two promotions ago. The work has increased but largely because of external pressures.

I'd say it balances out. For every night I'm sat on my laptop after the kids go to bed I have an early finish or have taken some time out during the day for something school related or such.

I do my job. Some days that's minimal work, some days it's mental. It evens out but I don't track it. But I'd never not deliver something because I ran out of time in my contracted hours. If that became an expected or regular thing then I'd be looking for a new role.

My job (academia) just doesn't really have a concept of 'your hours'. I can be incredibly flexible as long as I teach my allotted hours, attend the meetings I need to attend, hold office hours, supervisions etc, which is helpful for both work-life balance and parenting, but there's no sense of 9 to 5. I'm expected to produce research outputs of a specific calibre, PI research projects, disseminate research, do outreach, supervise students, attend conferences etc but, aside from certain allotted hours for teaching and committees, I can be very flexible about how I achieve this.

I work a 0.8FTE job - £75k salary if I was full time.

I do work over my hours, tbh I get given the same workload as everyone else and I’m fairly sure across the week I wind up doing the equivalent of full time hours.

I sort of see it as I’m paying £15k for the flexibility of being able to do that additional work at a time that suits me rather than being expected to be present 9.30-5.30 every day (I have two afternoons off a week which allows me to do two school pick ups.

Sometimes I feel like a bit of a mug for it, I have a colleague who has just gone back to full time as her view is she’s doing the full time work so may as well be getting the full time pay. But I like that I get two weekday afternoons to hang out with the kids (youngest is still in nursery so finishes at lunch) - I can’t do that at 9pm on a Wednesday might, whereas I can do the work at that time. Also from next year when youngest goes to school, I’ll get two afternoons with 2 hours entirely to myself which I’m very excited about!

Not anymore. I did in my 20s and 30s, but I’m now well established and have got myself into one of those ‘we need her or things will fall apart’ positions.

So i work my hours, and define quite a lot of my own job description.

I honestly think 0.8 is the worst pattern of all. It’s paid part time but most employers expect full time output. Have you considered going full time and doing compressed hours instead? At least you’ll get full time pay.

At my level I’m always on call if the shit hits the fan but don’t have the level of day-to-day ‘output’ that means I’m working over office hours on a daily basis. Equally I could argue I’m always ‘working’ because I do a lot of reading and research (as well as networking stuff) in the evenings and at weekends to stay abreast of the rapidly changing landscape (tech).
To get to this level however it was regularly 12 hour days, often catching up/doing extra at weekends, plus being on call pretty much 24/7 for 8 years!
I did my first school drop off and pick up when DC was 7, previously to that it was full days in nursery, then before and after school club. DH did all the logistics, I worked too far away.

I never did. It wasn’t possible. I did stay out overnight when necessary, and the key thing, I made sure to always deliver.