Push for firm 40 workweek faces challenges across the United States

Many American workers don’t really leave work. Emails, phone texts, pager alerts and phone calls pepper what once was personal time.

And that’s not including on-call shifts or beeper time, which require workers to be ready and able to work at a moment’s notice.

When is it time to call it quits?

A handful of company owners and executives around the country are beginning to put limits on work encroachment on personal time. They’re imposing quittin’ time policies, asking their employees to give a firm 40 hours a week and no more.

At United Shore Financial Services in Troy, Mich., employees are told to give the company everything they can for eight hours a day, and then go home to a personal life.

“It’s important that everyone here recognize that their job is part of their life, it isn’t their entire life,” said Laura Lawson, chief people officer at United Shore.

Lawson said the family-owned company wants “our team members to be focused and work hard for 40 hours a week while they’re at the office, and enjoy the rest of their time with their families.”

It’s a tacit bargain, she said: When the company considers its workers’ work-life balance, its workers reciprocate by “wanting to work harder while they’re here.”

According to the 2015 Workplace Flexibility Study by Workplace Trends and CareerArc, two-thirds of professionals surveyed said their managers expected them to be reachable outside the office. Equally, two-thirds of human resource officials said they expected employees to be reachable on their personal time.

This constant connectivity has seeped throughout professional ranks, blurring the line between work and home.

For many salaried employees who don’t receive overtime, “Employers around here mostly are saying, ‘Do your work. We’re not watching the clock,’” said Landa Williams, president of LandaJob Marketing and Creative Talent in Kansas City. “That may take more than eight hours, but we’re not watching the clock.”

Outside of organized labor contracts, that’s pretty much the American workplace norm.

“With our devices, we’re all so connected now,” said Kim Bartak, an engineer in Kansas City. “The first thing I do in the morning is check my email on my phone, and it’s the last thing I do before bed. It’s something I put on myself. I don’t want to be missing something.”

Bartak points out that sometimes she’s able to take care of a bit of business at night so that she feels like she has a head start in the morning. For her, constant connectivity isn’t necessarily a stressor, partly because she’s in control of her time.

Putting a limit on work time isn’t just about being nice. Repeated studies find that putting in a lot more hours on the job doesn’t help productivity rise. Worse, longer hours lead to increased rates of work errors, injuries and stress-related health problems. And it certainly doesn’t help people maintain a semblance of work-life balance.

While federal law does require time-and-a-half overtime pay for workers who are paid by the hour, compensation for most salaried workers doesn’t change based on hours spent on the job. The rationale is that the salary pays to accomplish the required duties, no matter how long they take.

As with any issue, it’s impossible to put all workers in one category. Some give extra effort; some don’t meet minimum standards. But most will agree that job cuts in the last recession and its aftermath made many workers less likely to complain to the boss.

Good workers who held onto their jobs pushed themselves to work longer, harder, to make themselves less likely to be layoff fodder. Others were forced to work longer because former colleagues weren’t around to share the load.

Whatever the reason for the no-clear-end workday, experts say it isn’t good for employers, either. John Pencavel, a Stanford University economics professor, is getting attention for his research into the negative effects of longer hours on productivity.

Some of his work was based on an old manufacturing environment, but his detailed studies indicated that “profit-maximizing” employers shouldn’t “be indifferent to the length of (employees’) working hours over a day or week.”

In other words, he concluded, demanding more hours won’t guarantee more output or more profit. At a certain point, workers simply aren’t as productive, no matter what they do.

This story was originally published December 9, 2015 at 10:57 AM with the headline "Push for firm 40 workweek faces challenges across the United States."