Maybe Ronald Reagan had it right. “It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?” the late US president once quipped.
Tell that to Elon Musk. In 2017, the billionaire chief executive of electric car-maker Tesla admitted to working 120 hours a week, insisting it was the only way his company would prosper. Reagan won the cold war, while Tesla’s battles seem endless. A lazy victory for a more relaxed work attitude? Probably so, actually.
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How to win at work
Make your work work better for you – from dealing with pesky colleagues to taking the perfect break and doing less for more money
In the modern work world, if you want to get on, you seemingly need to go full-on Elon. You must optimise productivity by skipping lunch and field emails in the evening and at the weekend. Busyness has become a powerful status symbol. In 2017, Silvia Belleza at Columbia Business School in New York and her colleagues asked volunteers in the US to assess the status of fictional individuals from short descriptions. Anything indicating the person was extremely busy resulted in .
Intriguingly, Belleza did the same thing with an Italian group, and found the effect reversed. And in fact the Italian concept of dolce far niente – “sweet doing nothing” – seems to be the winners’ formula. In 2018, Argyro Avgoustaki at ESCP Europe in Paris and Hans Frankort at Cass Business School in London examined data from some 52,000 employees across Europe. They found that for long periods, working “at very high speed” or to “tight deadlines”, scored lower on measures of mental and physical well-being. More surprisingly, these staff were also less likely to be promoted, or feel satisfied and secure in their jobs.
To Frankort, that makes sense. Escape from work is essential to maintain the cognitive capacities required for productivity. So go out for lunch, take a walk around the block and switch off work email in the evening. “If you exhaust yourself, you are going to reduce the quality of your work and, ultimately, you are going to lose out,” he says. “We’re not saying less work is better, we’re saying less overwork is better.”
The fact that relative slackers are being rewarded more, on average, than their workaholic counterparts suggests that managers are looking at outputs rather than inputs. But that’s not always possible, says , an organisational psychologist at the University of Manchester, UK. “It can be hard to judge performance in some jobs, so managers still tend to look at visible things like how late someone stays or how much pressure they appear to be under.”
Cooper says the onus is on employers to change. “Happier workplaces tend to have line managers with high levels of emotional intelligence,” he says. That means those who manage with praise and rewards, rather than finding faults. But Cooper does have some practical tips for the badly managed. “The evidence is clear that people who take control, rather than passively accepting a stressful situation, end up happier [and more productive],” he says. One way to do that is to tell your boss that his or her demands are excessive (see “Winning at work: how to manage your boss… and get that pay rise“). Who knows, they may have been too busy to realise.
Take-home message: Shirk better, work better
