Do you work on evenings and weekends?

Hello again everyone, I would like to share something that happened recently - as you know, I regularly give my nephew tutorials to help him prepare for his exam and my two sisters in Singapore would join in so my nephew can have a conducive, supportive learning environment. As Singapore is 7 hours ahead of London in the summer, the lessons typically take place in the early afternoon for me, so if it is 2 pm for me in London, it is 9 pm in Singapore. So on a Saturday night, both my sisters as various points had to say, "excuse me, my boss is trying to get me to do something urgently. I will be back soon." And of course, I told them to just attend to their work matters whilst I conducted the lesson for my nephew but I am shocked that they are expected to respond urgently on a Saturday night when it comes to work. This is highly unusual in the context of London but actually pretty normal for them in Singapore. In a recent post, we talked about dealing with a boring job and let's continue on this theme: how do you avoid being in my sisters' position whereby you are expected to put in an insane number of hours at work? How do you achieve a great work life balance? 

Study the organization carefully before starting your new job.

When you get to the stage where you are invited in for a job interview, there will be the opportunity to ask them some questions about the new job and of course, that's when you should raise the issue of work life balance, particularly when it comes to working from home. Given that the pandemic is here to stay for quite a while yet, working from home is always going to be a feature for many of us but just because we're working from home doesn't mean we have to work at 10 pm on a Saturday evening. That really depends on the expectations placed upon you by your boss about having to get work done: so if something arises during the weekend, can it wait till Monday morning before it gets resolved? Well, that depends on two things: for example, if I have a leak in my kitchen sink, then that's the kind of problem that needs to be resolved as soon as possible before my kitchen is flooded of course. But let me give you an example of when something can wait: my Taiwanese client once raised a question with me on a Saturday and I said I would need to clarify the transaction with the platform she used to place the trade. By Sunday evening, she was extremely irate that the matter had not been dealt with yet and I had to explain to her that British people don't work during the weekends, so the earliest the matter can be dealt with would be Monday morning UK time. So even if I was prepared to respond to my Taiwanese client during the weekend, the other companies that I work with in the UK certainly will not and therein lies the difference. 

So is working long hours a Chinese thing?

Is this an Asian vs the West dichotomy? I don't think so - even within China, I see a range of attitudes. On one hand, you have the employees who are not paid to work a minute overtime, these are typically civil servants so the moment the clock hits 5 pm, they refuse to answer phone calls and emails because they're probably already out of the front door by then. This is a legacy of Mao's communist era when he was trying to establish equality in Chinese society by making sure everyone got paid the same, regardless of work performance. Few were afraid to stand out in Mao's era by either working too hard or working too little - much emphasis was placed on being a part of the team, in blending in with everyone else that all the workers excelled at being mediocre. It was only after Mao passed away and Deng Xiaoping took over that all that began to change, but Deng had a massive challenge. He was trying to undo something that had already become part of the Chinese worker's mentality under Mao's rule. Fast forward to today, things have changed so much - you now have the famous Chinese work ethos of 9-9-6: that means working from 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week. When I was in Shenzhen in 2018, my hotel was right next to the corporate headquarters of Tencent and I saw staff leaving the office around midnight or even later - that's how hard some Chinese people work today if they are given the opportunity to make a lot of money in such a company. The fact that you can have both extremes co-existing in China today tells is that it isn't a Chinese or cultural issue per se but rather the environment that we have created for ourselves. 

It's not that I mind working longer hours, I just want my pay to reflect that! 

Oh yeah there are some jobs where you do get overtime pay and some jobs where you're given a monthly salary which covers all possibilities of overtime. Allow me to give you an example from my acting days: there are several components to our pay - there's the buy out (ie. when you sell the rights for your image to be used in media for an agreed period, within a geographical region) and then there's your daily rate. The latter is calculated based on a 'standard day' which is either a 10 or 12 hour day (depending on the contract you have negotiated) and the clock starts ticking from the moment you arrive on set. So there was this time when I was on set for the filming on an ad in London and the crew had encountered some technical difficulties in setting up the camera for a particularly tricky shot - we were meant to have finished at 8 pm that evening but because of those technical difficulties, we were still there at 11:30 pm but instead of grumbling about how long we had worked that day, everyone was in very high spirits because we knew that the moment we went one minute after 8 pm, we were all paid overtime and it was quite generous: it was calculated at x 1.5 our hourly rate for every hour or part thereof, so even if we finished at 8:05 pm, I was getting a whole hour's overtime. And beyond those first few hours of overtime, that could then go up to x 2 our hourly rate if that went beyond midnight. So basically, even though we have all had a very long and exhausting day, nobody was complaining because we were paid rather well for working overtime. It is simple, you want your staff to be happy to work overtime? Just pay them for it: problem solved. 

Is it the fault of the employees? 

The pandemic has forced a lot of people to work from home - this has only resulted in much longer working hours for my two sisters in Singapore. Before the pandemic, there was the mindset at least that some functions could only be performed in the office, for example, meetings were regularly held for the teams to work together and you were expected to attend such meetings in person - that was simply the norm back then. Well, times have changed so the concept of turning off your computer and leaving the office is now a thing of the past: now people like my two sisters are expected to respond to their management's demands 24-7. Is this inevitable for people working from home? I don't think so - I believe there is another issue at stake here which is the root cause of the problem. Allow me to use a recent experience to illustrate my point: I had to take my pre-departure Covid-test in order to visit Portugal back in May. The tests that I had ordered were meant to be sent to me but there was a delay in the delivery which led me to try to contact them to find out what the hell was going on: holy shit, that was a total nightmare. I had to wait over an hour before I could get through their call center and emails to their office were ignored or answered only after a few days - it was evident that this company was woefully understaffed and that even if the staff there did absolutely nothing wrong, there just weren't enough staff to cope with the amount of work that had to be done. One of the emails sent to me arrived at 1:25 am in the morning and it was clear that this person was working all night to clear the backlog of emails. In this case, I blamed the company for not hiring enough staff to deal with the workload, but I felt sorry for the people trying their best to serve me. 

Or is it the fault of the boss?

This is the root cause of why some companies are forcing their staff to work hideously long hours - such employers are trying to minimize their cost by hiring as few staff as possible. It is a shortsighted view when it comes to business development: imagine a restaurant that adopts this strategy. They try to boost their earnings by hiring less cooks and waiters so they get to maximize their profits by keeping their costs low. Would this strategy work? Before you answer, allow me to point out that it depends on the situation! If it is a rainy Monday evening and you're not expecting a lot of customers, then reducing your costs by having less staff that night would make a lot of sense since it'll make little sense to have too many staff on a relatively quiet night like that. But if it is a public holiday and the weather is nice, then you have good reason to expect a lot more customers; thus trying to reduce the number of staff on such a day would simply be foolish because having a situation where you're understaffed would lead to many unhappy customers who would have to wait a very long time for their food and if that leads to many poor reviews online, then any marginal savings you might have made by using less staff that day would be canceled out by the long term damage done to your reputation when others avoid your restaurant after having read all those terrible reviews. Thus an intelligent businessman will know how to exactly manage this situation properly to both maximize profits and customer satisfaction by getting the balance just right - so having the right kind of boss who knows how to get the balance right on this vital issue can make a huge difference. 

Or perhaps this is just peer pressure? 

My sisters simply accept that working during the evenings and weekend is totally normal for them for a simple reason: all their colleagues and the majority of their friends in Singapore do it. There might even be an element of guilt on their part - if everyone is willing to make this sacrifice for work, would simply refusing to do it make them come across as lazy in contrast? By that token, unless my sisters are willing to make a rather radical decision like change careers or even move abroad, they are pretty much constrained by the cultural norms in Singapore. So if an employer in Singapore finds a particular member of staff unwilling or unable to work during evenings and weekends, then s/he can find a replacement with ease. However, this is hardly a situation unique to Singapore - the exact same thing happens in Japan as well whereby workers feel guilty about leaving the office even if they have nothing left to do, simply because being the first one to leave will make them appear lazy compared to their other colleagues who have stayed longer than them in the office. Thus working longer hours does not lead to more productivity, indeed many Japanese workers simply spend hours in the office on social media whilst maintaining the facade of 'oh I am staying late tonight and working hard like my colleagues'. Officially, Japan's productivity lags way behind other G7 countries yet few Japanese people are willing to even speak up to challenge this aspect of their culture - most of them simply conform without asking any questions. So is it even possible to find a company in Singapore or Japan where this kind of behaviour isn't the norm? Of course that's possible - but the onus is then on the individual to be aware of what kind of companies to avoid when seeking a new job. 

What can someone in Singapore or Japan do in this situation then?

Well the obvious solution is to avoid a job where you can work from home - allow me to use my friend Lee in Singapore as an example. He is a dentist and thus obviously, that's not a job he can do from home. If you want him to fix your teeth, you have to make an appointment to see him at the dental clinic where he works. So at least his ability to work from home is hindered by the fact that he can't perform any kind of dental surgery without all the medical equipment in the clinic. So in Lee's case, he truly can switch off the moment he leaves his place of work. I also have another friend in Singapore who works in a sushi restaurant - she doesn't prepare the rice or the fish at home, no all that is done at the restaurant and whilst her shifts may be long, at least the moment she leaves the restaurant, just like Lee, she is off the clock and is not going to work again until the start of her next shift. The other alternative to that is to set up your own business and be your own boss, that way you call all the shots and you simply don't have a boss at all - problem solved. But of course, it isn't a perfect solution either. I have an old friend in Singapore, let's call him Teo, he is the CEO of his own company because he wanted to have that level of control over his own time. However, he is working harder than most people I know - when I visited him in Singapore, we met up for dinner around 9 pm and then he went right back to work after that. Then when Teo came to visit me in London, he was constantly answering phone calls and emails. I told him that he was the boss, he can just turn his phone off but he replied, "I wish I could - I'm afraid I have already delegated and outsourced all I can, but some important matters I've to do myself even, when I am on holiday in London!" 

But wait, does it really matter? Is this a problem? 

Teo runs his own business, his company is like his baby (especially since he doesn't have any children) and he is very passionate about the work he does. So actually, he really enjoys what he does for a living, he can be so proud of his accomplishments and he doesn't mind working such long hours. But of course, allow me to point out that Teo is also an extremely rich and successful businessman - he earns a lot and so with money being the incentive for him, it isn't hard to see why he is happy to work such long hours. I daresay my two sisters (and a lot of people in Singapore I know) simply don't have Teo's level of job satisfaction. They look at the way I work in London, where I have great work-life balance and they are insanely jealous of this aspect of the culture here. Thus I can see that my friend Teo chooses to work very hard as he is the boss, but my two sisters really don't have a choice in the matter and thus they have to comply begrudgingly. Thus I think it is necessary to look at the detail in each case, as Teo's circumstances are quite different compared to my two sisters. Of course, I think that we need to be reasonable: after all, one can never expect a job to be perfect - recently, I had talked about having to deal with certain boring aspects of one's job. Whilst my sisters certainly don't have the perfect job (and to be fair, neither do I), I think the quality of their work life balance could be greatly enhanced if their bosses were to simply back off on the issue of expecting them to get things done during the evenings and weekends: oh that would make such a difference. Is it therefore simply a question of respect: would you expect your boss to respect the fact that your evenings and weekend are reserved for your family and that it would be rather unfair to expect you to drop everything just to respond to an email when you're spending Sunday evening having some quality time with your family? 

So that's it from me on this topic - what do you think? Do you respond to work emails and calls during evenings and weekends? Am I being too harsh with my two sisters; are my expectations having a perfect work life balance somewhat unrealistic? Do you know of people like my friend Teo? Do you feel peer pressure to work long hours or does your boss expect you to do that? Are you paid for overtime or is that something that's just 'part of the deal' for you at work? Are there concrete steps we can take to address this issue of having a decent work life balance? What are the consequences of overworking when work cuts into your evenings and weekends? Do leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.