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Heartbreak at Work
Are long hours leading to employee heart disease and heart attacks? One study says, "Yes." And even though most organizations won't be able to hire more staff to take some of their workload, there are actions HR leaders can take to alleviate some of the problem.
A recent study connecting long work hours with heart problems should provide a "wakeup call" to organizations, HR professionals and workers themselves, says Dr. Gordon McInnes, a professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Glasgow, who wrote an accompanying editorial for the study. The study of British civil servants suggests that individuals who work more than 10 hours a day are about 60 percent more likely to develop heart disease or have a heart attack than those who work just seven hours a day. In fact, during the study itself, 369 of the 6,000 people studied had heart attacks (some fatal) or were diagnosed with heart disease. Can these findings be exported to the United States -- and to those in private-industry jobs? Workplace experts say, "Yes." Stephen Balzac, president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational-development and management-consulting firm in Stow, Mass., and author of The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development, says that he's "found that, when comparing studies of this kind and trying to determine if the results translate from one country to another, I need to ask a couple of key questions." Those questions are: "Was the study conducted on human beings?" and "Are the inhabitants of the second country human beings?" If the answer to both questions is "yes," he suggests, the results are relevant. Joyce Maroney, managing director of The Workforce Institute at Kronos, a Chelmsford, Mass.-based time-and-attendance software provider, agrees. "It is safe to make the leap that whether salaried or paid on an hourly basis, the findings would be similar -- people who are working longer shifts would be more likely to have poor health outcomes," she says. Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, in Washington, D.C., says it's clear that "working harder and feeling stress [will] eat away at people's feelings of well-being and resiliency." "When you look at some of the data, for example, of workers who have no control over their jobs or minorities who have little control, historically, over their environments, they have more heart disease -- they have more health problems." But, says Darling, "factors that affect somebody's health or productivity come from multiple sources," including relationships with managers and organizational leaders, commute length, family situations, financial situations, etc. And, she says, such factors are cumulative. "The more you accumulate factors that are harmful, the worse things are. It's pretty obvious." Some issues may have always been there -- others may be a factor of the current economic environment. "It's very different now," says Darling. "One could have had a really bad manager for years. But, if you also have the same managers that are problems now doing layoffs and having to shut down lines and having to themselves maybe lose their jobs, there's a sort of 'double whammy'," she says. But is there anything HR professionals do about it? Simple solutions -- such as hiring more staff to get the work done so employees don't have to work as long -- may not be an option, Darling says. "Right now we have a situation where even employers doing slightly better than they were are too scared about a double-dip recession and their top-line growth isn't enough to begin hiring ... . " She notes that productivity is "at the highest level ever, but you could really argue that it [is], in a way, too high. You can literally drive people too hard." Last quarter's downtick in productivity might have resulted from "a kind of exhaustion factor," she says. Clearly employees can only do more for a while before they begin experiencing symptoms of burnout that readily translate into decreased productivity. Despite the still-tight hiring environment, however, there are actions HR professionals can take to ease the situation, experts say. Initially, says Maroney, it's important to fully understand the current scheduling situation. How long are people working? Are they working longer in certain departments than others? Are they working multiple shifts? Are there certain days of the week, weeks of the month or months of the year when work hours spike? "You can't manage what you can't measure," she says, and employers need that kind of visibility into the workforce. "It also gives you means of ensuring that people aren't working one shift in one part of the organization and immediately flipping over to some other location or department," she says. "If you want to manage this behavior so you can improve employee-health outcomes, central scheduling and central timekeeping tools will help you do that." HR leaders should also try to identify specific areas that could be helped by making process improvements that can lead to efficiency. Unclear goals and unrealistic deadlines can have a big impact on efficiency, says Balzac, and often contribute to excessive hours on the job. "Long hours frequently result from poor team development, ill-defined goals and unrealistic deadlines," he says. Too often, teams attempt to "hit the ground running" when they should, instead, "hit the ground walking and accelerate." In addition, he says: "Goals are often vague, confusing or even contradictory. Investing some up-front time in goal definition can lead to teams that don't need to work long hours because they aren't wasting their time." Finally, he says: "Deadlines frequently are the result of wishful thinking ... . Companies need to take the time to figure out how fast they can move and what is, or is not, realistic. That prevents people from working long hours trying to meet an arbitrary milestone." In addition, Maroney says, giving employees some sense of control over their work and their time can be helpful. "One of the things we recommend with our customers as a better practice is to give employees participation in choosing their shifts, expressing preferences about when they want to work," she says. "The ability to have some control over my own destiny is a means of helping to improve employee-health outcomes." Early results from a study that is underway suggest support for the notion that employees who are working schedules that fit their needs are more likely to be happy at work and less likely to worry about problems at home, she says. "It's not only the sheer number of hours I'm working that impacts my physical well-being, but if I'm working more hours that make sense for the type of balance I'm trying to strike with my life, I'm more likely to be productive and focused with my work," Maroney says. May 27, 2010 Copyright 2010© LRP Publications |
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© Copyright 2012 LRP Publications. All rights reserved.
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