Why Your Job Could Kill YoU
We've all had the unpleasant
experience of working in a toxic organization or for a horrific boss.
But did you ever think that your job could make you sick? In this
interview with noted Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer,
PoetsandQuants.com contributor
Neelima Mahajan-Bansal explores the impact of organizational culture on
personal health. It's a fascinating and convincing look at a
provocative subject, first acknowledged in workaholic Japan.
In
the 1980s, a curious wave spread across Japan. Several senior
executives, with no history of prior illness, started dying young. It
was soon found that these untimely deaths were happening due to
overwork, a legacy of Japanese production practices which enhanced
productivity at the cost of employee well-being. This phenomenon became
so rampant that it was given a name:
karoshi or death by overwork. Most
karoshi deaths were, very predictably, happening due to stress-induced problems like heart attacks and strokes.
While
Japan has probably seen the worst case of workplace stress, employees
in other countries are also feeling the heat. Jeffrey Pfeffer, the
Thomas D. Dee II professor of organizational behavior at Stanford
University’s Graduate School of Business, has been thinking about the
negative impact of organizations on human health for a while now.
Pfeffer, the author of popular books like
The Knowing-Doing Gap (co-authored with Stanford colleague Robert Sutton),
Hard Facts (co-authored with Sutton),
What Were They Thinking?, believes that health, both physical and mental, is an important indicator of an organization’s functioning.
“It
is said that when people are dying prematurely, it reflects something
about the well-being of society,” says Pfeffer. “I think that’s true
about organizations as well: you would need to look at the health and
well-being, physical as well as mental, of employees in an organization.
I would use that as a measure of whether or not an organization is
being well-run and well-managed.” In an Academy of Management
Perspectives article titled
Building Sustainable Organizations: the Human Factor,
Pfeffer draws attention to the neglected effects of “organizations and
their decisions about people on human health and mortality”.
He
goes a step further and recommends that just as companies have to report
their carbon emissions, they should also report on and be held
accountable for the health – both physical and mental – of their
workforce. At the heart of Pfeffer’s argument is the fact that
organizations take a very narrow view of sustainability: they give human
and social sustainability little importance in contrast to
environmental sustainability. “Just like we worry about environmental
sustainability, we need to worry about social sustainability,” says
Pfeffer “Do you have people who can work for a given number of years
under the conditions in which they are working, or are they going to
burn themselves out or be stressed out over economic insecurity issues?”
IS YOUR JOB KILLING YOU?
Pfeffer,
who is known not to mince words, has every reason to hold organizations
responsible. “There is actually a lot of evidence which talks about the
effect of long working hours on high blood pressure, the effect of job
loss on mortality and morbidity and the effect of the absence of job
control on cardiovascular diseases and things like that. The more I
looked at this, the more I found and the more important I began to think
that this issue really was,” says Pfeffer.
The evidence, he
believes, is already out there. Research from across the world shows
that layoffs are very stressful and raise, particularly for men, the
risk of death from cardiovascular disease. Also, those laid off are
about nine times as likely to come back to the workplace and commit a
violent act as those not laid off. Long work hours lead to high blood
pressure and have negative implications for work-life balance. An
interesting angle here is the amount of control you have over your job. A
study done by Sir Michael Marmot of University College London found
that the higher your civil service rank, the lower your risk of dying.
And that’s because the higher your rank, the more control you have over
your job, and low job control increases the likelihood of illness,
premature death and economic insecurity. If all that evidence is not
enough, studies show that if you give women maternity leave, they are
much less likely to undergo caesarean sections.
According to
Pfeffer, several airlines, some Silicon Valley companies, management
consulting firms and investment banks, deserve a severe rap on the
knuckles. While the airlines do not take employee needs into account
while scheduling work, Silicon Valley companies and investment banks
ignore the crucial issue of work-life balance. “I recall a woman from
one of the large investment firms telling me that she had asked another
woman to work on a weekend and she had said no. So she looked at me and
said, ‘That’s like insubordination – we would have never done that!’ And
so I think people are pushing back, but companies haven’t really done
very much to accommodate the fact that people want to have a life,” says
Pfeffer. The situation in the U.S. might be worse than it may seem. “We
are the only industrialized country that doesn’t have required vacation
or required paid time off. We have now the longest or second-longest
work hours in the world and I think all of this has contributed to the
high cost of healthcare in this country,” says Pfeffer.
'ECONOMIC INSECURITY IS CONTRIBUTING TO ILL HEALTH'
But
apparently a lot of companies are doing things to improve employee
health. So are they still to be blamed? Yes, according to Pfeffer, not
all their efforts are well-directed. “What has struck me is that you see
all these workplace health initiatives where there is all this effort
on smoking cessation, exercise and healthier choices in the cafeteria,
all of which are of course good things. But these are not the root cause
of ill health. The much more important cause of ill health is the issue
of economic insecurity – the long work hours, work-family conflict, the
job stress and strain,” he says.
"We live in an age with flatter
hierarchies and apparently more flexibility – ideas like flexi-timing
and work-from-home have gained widespread acceptance. Logically, that
should have led to greater employee welfare. Has that happened at all?
“Flexibility is actually interesting. It comes not just from the
policies that companies have, but also from whether or not the company
has a culture that permits people to take advantage of the apparent
flexibility that they offer,” he says.
Pfeffer cites the example
of simple things like the facility to work from home or maternity leave.
“You’ll see people, typically women employees, not really availing
themselves of these practices and policies. If you ask them why, they
say that the company has actually has made it ‘formally’ available but
it’s not considered good – it’s not considered to be career enhancing to
actually take advantage of these formal policies which are supposedly
made available. So it’s a tricky issue,” says Pfeffer.
UNDOING THE DAMAGE
Companies
need to rethink job design and give people more autonomy, something
that has been advocated by many organizational behavior experts for a
long time. This could mean autonomy to decide when to work so that you
have some control over your life. “It’s like saying, ‘Here’s the set of
things you need to accomplish. You have to take responsibility to figure
out how to accomplish them’,” says Pfeffer. “I am not going to tell you
every minute, what to do and how to do it.” He adds that autonomy and
freedom are both important – the freedom to say I have other
responsibilities so I need to take time off to go and watch my kid’s
soccer game.
But does such a job exist? “Yes. If you look at SAS
Institute, the largest privately owned software company in the world and
a company that it is typically ranked very high on the Fortune Best
Places to Work list, this is exactly how they operate,” says Pfeffer. So
what makes SAS different? “SAS has reasonable working hours (and) tells
its employees to go home by 6; many exercise and eating facilities that
provide opportunities to exercise and relax at work; generous benefits
including medical and also support for adoptions and eldercare that
reduce stress; onsite daycare which reduces work-family conflict and the
associated stress; private offices for everyone; and most importantly,
work that is engaging and that provides a lot of control to the
individuals doing the work,” says Pfeffer.
Eventually, all this
boils down to the organization’s culture and values and whether or not
it is really serious about allowing employees the opportunity to have a
more balanced life. In many organizations, believes Pfeffer, there is
lip service devoted to work/life balance, but if you want to get ahead,
you have to make significant personal sacrifices. “It is about the
culture of the organization and whether or not you believe that Number
1, your people are important; and Number 2, if your people are
important, then you really need to take care of them,” says Pfeffer.
