There are really 3 types of people who put in the super hours:
suckers letting the company push them around
slackers who still aren’t getting 40 hours of work done but are great at putting on a show
workaholics
Where I currently work has a large collection of group 2. My favorite was the one who’d discuss her major work hours constantly, and yet somehow always got to work after me and the first thing she did after getting her morning coffee was call her aunt and talk to her for an hour. She might have spent twice as much time in the office as me every week but I guarantee she wasn’t getting as much work done.
Everyone knows people who waste time in the office, however your generalization not withstanding, the only folks I know who think the only reason people put in more than 40 hours is because of laziness are execs and middle managers.
A lot of folks put in a lot of hours to make up for understaffing and frankly, flat out management incompetence. Poor management is the number one reason for long hours in my experience, bar none.
Of course the managers are never the ones who have to do the long hours due to their ineptitude, but they make damned sure their superiors think those “lazy malcontents” that raise their issues up to them about the mismanagement of the project are viewed as just lazy whiners.
I wouldn’t like the IBM situation at all. I don’t mind putting in my 40 hours, but anything over that makes me grumpy.
Not always! I work 65 plus hours a week because the work is here. Most of our employees work at least 50 hours a week and no one tells them they must work extra. We are a small company of highly dedicated, highly paid professionals.
Last year our little company earned over $450,000 per person. The employee bonuses were huge. Most bonuses equaled or exceeded the employees base salary.
My W2 tells me I am not a sucker and I am definitely not a slacker. We make more decisions and do more in one week than most any companies our size do in a month. I may be a workaholic, but at least I am a well compensated workaholic.
We are a highly motivated group and we do not have job descriptions, but we work our asses off. The best way to describe our company can be found in a book called Good to Great by Jim Collins.
Basically, if the company is run correctly the employees will determine the direction and success of the company. It comes down to hiring the right people in the first place, removing obstacles to accomplishment and treating them fairly.