Burning Time
Addressing a normalized but unacceptable fact of work life
“She was extending her breaks without permission, which is stealing time from the company. It’s just theft, plain and simple.”
Once upon a time, I reviewed an appeal from a manager who’d been dismissed in a disciplinary process. The firing offense was bad timekeeping.
Approaching the case initially, I was expecting to see a severe pattern of flagrant violations substantial enough to have damaged the performance of the individual. But as each layer of irrelevance and distraction in the case file was peeled away, it became obvious that this was a solid manager who was alleged to have misappropriated a grand total of 90 minutes of work time by taking extended breaks in a few instances.
And she was fired for it.
The street value of the infraction was about $30. About 3% of what it cost for me and my partner to spend 10 hours reviewing it.
The appellant was able to document two important facts.
First, that the longer breaks were to tend to her sick children. She was a single mother juggling the demands of parenthood and a demanding job. She had chosen to bundle her time, taking one long break instead of three shorter ones so she could drive home, check in on them, and come back.
Second, she had actually done this with her manager’s approval. When that approval was later withdrawn, she reverted to a normal break pattern.
So basically, the whole thing was a dumb misunderstanding. It should have been defused with an adult conversation rather than escalated in the first place.
I chose to reinstate the manager. There were many arguments for doing so.
But one particular reason still rings in my ears.
“I’ve worked in this company for several years and I have always given more time than required.”
Evidence supported the claim. She’d worked about 350 hours more than contractually required in the 9 months prior to the incident. Re-phrased, the company had appropriated 8-10 extra hours of this individual’s time every week.
Despite the pattern being entrenched, no one noticed, much less pay her for the extra time. But when she appropriated 1.5 hours, with some level of approval, she was criminalized and sacked.
This inequity is normalized in our business culture to an extent we totally accept and don’t even question it. That doesn’t make it right, of course.
At another point in my career, senior management became concerned enough about fatigue in the salaried team that we reviewed everyone’s work hours.
The results were alarming. Everyone was working beyond contract, by an average of 10 hours every week. The pattern was sustained. Basically everyone was giving the company excess time.
Our first impulse was to say yeah, but we’re not asking them to do that.
But actions speak louder than words. We definitely were asking them to do it.
We’d been tacitly communicating expectations which added up to more hours than our people were contractually obligated to provide. To meet those expectations, they were giving us 10 extra hours every week, sometimes more.
The annualized value of those additional hours was around $550,000. But no one came after us for time theft. No one accused us of misappropriation. No one, including me, suggested raising everyone’s salary to cover the hours they were working.
We committed to reducing workloads as best we could, and we moved on.
We didn’t check hours again. Sometimes it’s better to avoid a question than to acknowledge the answer.
How we value time in the work arena is an interesting test of perspective.
Employees give extra time coextensive with their felt obligations, often augmenting with discretionary effort off their own backs.
To “thank” them, employers seek continually to intensify the working day, lengthen it without additional labor cost, and to control how and where workers spend their time.
The generosity flows in one direction, sucked forcefully in that direction by a vacuum of cold rationality.
This is all seen as normal and legitimate, baked into a culture with stabilized expectations everyone more or less accepts.
But acceptance and normalization obscure ugly truths.
Employers who demand, expect, or accept unpaid time from employees are wage thieves. The only question is whether their theft is aggravated by coercive or predatory tactics. But not paying people for their time is just stealing from them.
We know this is true because business leaders tell us so, often unintentionally.
“Time is money.”
You’ve heard it a million times. The more wealthy and highly placed an individual, the more likely they are to say and believe it. Executives whose time is scarce come to realize that it is valuable. Maybe the most precious of their possessions. And they therefore expect to be paid for it.
This is no less true for the rank and file.
Because time isn’t just money. It’s the key to initiative in life. When you have it, you dictate what’s happening in your life. When you don’t, you get pinned down, motionless and powerless, fighting off the alligator closest to the boat.
Sadly, there is almost no regulation of wage theft in its various forms, which is why it continues to siphon billions of dollars from the pockets of employees every year in both the US and UK labor markets.
But we don’t need to wait for regulators or labor unions to solve this for us. If you’re a leader, you can challenge this issue by treating the status quo as a bug rather than a feature.
Leaders operate in shared value systems. They understand the moral implications of physical realities. So leaders will understand that when someone is robbed of property rightfully theirs, they feel diminished. Undignified. Used.
Disrespected.
To disrespect someone’s time is to disrespect that person fundamentally. Leaders know and get this. Because they know without respect, you can’t have a relationship. No mutual loyalty. No sense of belonging.
And where these things don’t exist, performance of a team is hard-capped at mediocre.
So, where you have the latitude to do so, proactively manage the hours your people are spending on work. Limit them. Have mechanisms to cut them off physically and virtually.
More importantly, ask fundamental questions and be self-critical about the answers. What do your people think you expect from them? Do those expectations fit in their contractual work week?
Have mechanisms to periodically review the workloads you’re creating, the deliverables you’re expecting, and the time it takes to perform the roles in your organization to the standard you expect.
Where short of resources, add them. Don’t be predatory.
Time is precious. Burning someone’s time by giving them nothing in return for it … is burning away part of their life.
I use the burn metaphor purposely, because the way to reduce burnout is the same way to engender equality and respect between employers and employees; and that is to honor and acknowledge the value of time for everyone, not just those senior enough to bargain for fair terms.
Companies seem to understand the value of time as it pertains to senior leaders and even customers. But not so much as it pertains to those at the coal face of value creation. That has to change.
Burning the time of your people is never acceptable. If you have any doubt about that, invert the question and pretend your people burned company time.
And then be honest with yourself, and react accordingly.
TC is a former senior manager and expert on organizational leadership and management.