Because if my value to my team is only a factor of productivity versus cost, and not as a human being, why should I put my own mental wellbeing at risk for you?
That makes no sense, and we are seeing more and more people recognize this fact. Either figure out how to support the human beings who work for you, or stop hiring them.
At least that way you aren’t actively harming anyone with your job.
Imagine being so bad at disconnecting from work, or letting your coworkers and employees truly disconnect, that the only way to actually get them to take a significant break from working is to close the business down for some time.
What does that say about our society, and our values?
Putting this on individual employees is a cop-out. Saying this isn’t anyone’s fault is a cop-out. This obsession with busyness is a direct result of poor management. There was no mass movement of employees who decided that appearing busy was more important than getting real work done, they simply responded to incentives, and the incentives have favored people who don’t make time to be productive, but are also quick to respond, no matter how unproductive it made them, and until recently, were also the ones sitting at their desks for long hours. People who tried to avoid this, and unplug from work? Yeah right, again, this wasn’t something employees just decided to do on their own. They responded to poor management.
Yesterday I attended a meeting that lasted 3 minutes.
At the time I was happy to have not wasted any more time in a meeting than was absolutely necessary and get 27 minutes back of my day.
So, good for us for not wasting time and filling the half-hour time slot.
On the other hand, if ever there was a meeting that could have been an email, this was it.
But seriously, we need to stop telling people that one of the signs of a phishing email is poor writing, or the generic text because that is going away fast. The tools used to create the message are getting better and better.
Look at it this way, if you’re a client of one of these companies, who do you want doing your work, the associate who hasn’t slept more than 4 hours a night in weeks, or someone who’s actually rested? Who is going to do a better job for you? Who is going to be most cognitively effective?
Why do we keep grinding away at the expense of our own cognitive abilities then?