Voluntary Overtime: Goodwill? Good grief.

A concerning statistic in Western civilisation is the rapid increase in average daily work hours. The 9-to-5 schedule has now become a mere guideline by which folks voluntarily stack extra hours.

Personally, I have volunteered unpaid overtime for many reasons. To uplift my professional profile, to reduce the chances of being retrenched, to qualify for upcoming promotions, and for the respect of my managers and colleagues. I have discovered though that working overtime without asking for reimbursement achieves none of these goals. In fact, I will demonstrate why this behaviour will work against you, and your colleagues.

If you are a hard working individual, or have kids who are starting out in the corporate environment, please read through and discuss these issues with them. There is no hypothesis here, I have learned these difficult truths firsthand and I hope you can teach it to others.

I will start with a discussion on young office workers, as they are most susceptible to developing the voluntary overtime habit.

Overtime: Competing on new ground

Young workers frequently feel compelled to make a name for themselves in office environments. The show of dedication is usually manifested in coming to work early, and leaving work after everyone else has left. This type of behaviour will get you noticed, but most likely by other young workers who are competing with you.

I have spoken with managers who have bragged about how much more young people are willing to work for nothing, in the name of competition. If you are a young office worker, do not feel compelled to compete on overtime. You are always better off competing on productivity. In the following section, I will give you enough information to convince you not to voluntarily put in more hours.

Competing on unpaid overtime can get out of control very quickly. In my youth, I was a real go-getter. I got to work before everyone else, and vowed to be the last person to leave. I was on a small salary, but wanted to prove my dedication. I was hired along with other recently graduated students. We all wanted to stand out. What we did to stand out was nothing short of moronic.

The time would be six o’clock in the evening. All but a few senior managers had left for home already. Still, myself and the other young graduates were battling it out. No more work needed to be done, this charade was all about appearances. The time would roll over to seven, then eight. As the last senior manager leaves, the surviving group of graduates would finally part hoping that the senior manager noticed the commitment on their way out.

This went on for a few months. The same graduates would stay back every time. Those who didn’t, felt bad about leaving early, worrying that they may fall behind in the popularity contest. While striving to stand out, we had all blended in. The finish line was no different from the starting line, yet countless hours of our lives had been wasted, time we can never reclaim.

Now as I hear from senior managers who utilise this competition for cheaper labour, I cringe that I was once one of these poor young souls. Please learn from my mistakes, and do not start your career in this way. You will make it harder on yourself, and others who are starting out.

Setting of New Expectations

Picture this: You visit the local bakery operated by a small family. Each loaf of bread is marked at $1 each. As you attempt to buy 2 loafs, a member of the family business gives you 3 loafs instead, just for goodwill. So effectively, you received 3 loafs of bread for the price of 2. This continues every day for a year. One fine morning, you attempt to pay but do not receive the extra loaf. What happens? Was there an expectation? Do you feel hard done by? Probably, yes. Even though you are paying the set price for the bread, you almost feel ripped off.

This scenario translates directly to your willingness to work more hours then you are being paid. A good friend and colleague had been staying back at work for two to three hours every night for several months, rarely leaving before 7:30 in the evening. He was not paid for overtime. One day, as the time was approaching 6 o’clock, he prepared his bag to go home. His manager walked past his desk, looked at his watch and said “Are you leaving early today?” Amazing.

My colleague explained that his daughter was having a party in the evening, and that he needs to be present. His manager gave him a look of disapproval, as if he was taking a sick day, and said “We all have somewhere else we’d like to be. But if you need to go, go.” This is the power of expectations.

If like me you heard this story for the first time, you would be questioning the moral code of the manager. Yet, we are all guilty of expectations. Like a child expecting a gift on Christmas day, we all develop expectations from our environment. In the manager’s defence, my colleague had set a new expectation on his working hours. Anything short of this made his commitment look questionable.

Do not set unachievable expectations. Not in your work place, not in your personal life. If you took care of the cheque every single time you had dinner with friends, there will be an expectation for you to pay time and again. Your intentions may be good, but be careful in creating expectations that may come back to bite you.

Recency: The fallacy of building goodwill

At first, you may feel like a trooper. Going above and beyond the call of duty. You tell yourself that you are building “goodwill” with your employer. However, there is a fallacy in the nature of human beings called “recency”. No matter what you have done in the past, the perception that people have of you is dependent only on the most recent encounter.

If a person has been kind to you the last 50 times you have encountered them, and today they were rude to you, how will you feel about them? Likely, you will forget the many times they were kind, and focus on the single last encounter when they were rude.

Corporations and employers also share the “recency” affliction. Goodwill is predicated on your most recent behaviour, do not fool yourself into thinking that long-term unpaid work affects the appreciation of your employer. It doesn’t.

In six months, a colleague of mine had tallied over 600 hours of unpaid work. He had made a small error in an important client document two weeks before his annual review. Upper management focussed almost entirely on his “lack of focus on small details”. Any goodwill he thought he had with the organisation due to his selflessness was completely eroded by his most recent fumble.

In contrast, I have personally known many employees who purposefully exploit recency by vastly increasing their performance just before an annual review. One particular employee was close to being fired four times in a single year. He battled an 80 hour week prior to his review, and got a pat on the back. Such is the way of human beings and the corporations that house them.

The lesson here isn’t to manipulate your employer in the weeks leading up to a review. On the contrary, it is to free you from the burden of building goodwill throughout your professional life. You are much better off spending that time with people you love, your friends and family. Do not trade your time voluntarily without appreciation.

Your efforts working against you

I promised to offer some advice to persuade you against voluntary overtime, and I plan to deliver it in this section. I wish this advice was given to me many years ago, but more often than not, we receive advice when we are ready to receive it.

As I continued my tirade of working long hours and weekends, a new manager was introduced into my team. He and I became very close friends. He had worked for many international corporations in several different countries, and became the person I report to.

From other managers I had received many “pats on the back” for putting in the hours, showing my dedication, and never asking to be reimbursed. However, my new manager had a different take on things. He took me out for a coffee during lunch, and said to me:

“You are one of the finest employees I have. Upper management would kill me if they find out I told you this, so I am telling you as a friend. Your unpaid work needs to stop now.”

I could not believe my ears.

“By working more hours than anyone else in this office, you are sending one of two signals, and I believe you are not aware of the other.”

I listened carefully.

“One: That you are a dedicated member of this team and you value your work, which is why you diligently work hard after everyone has gone home.”

I nodded. I couldn’t imagine what other signal I was giving others.

“The second, and most important: You are demonstrating that you cannot complete your work in the normal allotted time.”

I was momentarily speechless. I had never even thought about it like that before. He was right. If two people had the same job, and one took 80 hours to do what others considered 40 hours of work, did that show dedication, or a bad management of time?

He continued, “I know you work solidly, and churn through more work per hour than other people. I know this, but I’m the only person who knows this. To others, you may be giving the appearance that you simply cannot keep up.”

I felt incredibly stupid. I had never thought about things from this perspective before. I realised why some of the most valued people in the company went home at 5 o’clock. They didn’t look lazy, they looked like they knew how to manage their time properly.

The affect of this conversation was immediate. Once I started looking at my behaviour from this perspective, I ceased to work any more than I needed to. I hope that you discovered this lesson earlier than I did, and if not, please integrate this into your professional life as soon as possible. What we attempt to project to others is not always what they receive.

It can wait until tomorrow

My aim here is not to convince you to get paid for unnecessary overtime. On the contrary, I want you to ask yourself why you are working more hours than is necessary. I often told myself (and others) that my work never ends, I have so much to do. In truth: It can wait until tomorrow.

As the professional environment becomes more competitive, we should remind ourselves what we are competing on. Work? or Time? If you work only two extra hours per day, this adds up to 500 hours in a year. In all honesty, if you have a voluntary nature, there are a lot of charities that need your help more than a profit based organisation.

My goal in writing this article was to help you, your colleagues and your children avoid the pitfalls that so many of us do. With a conscious view voluntary overtime, I hope I have persuaded you not to walk down this road. Your time is valuable and limited, and I sincerely appreciate you taking some of it to read this piece. May your next work day end in daylight.