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Night Shift Appeals to White-Collar Workers
White-collar employees, formerly the 9-to-5 workers, are increasingly assuming night-shift duties, in response to both personal and work demands.
Increasing numbers of white-collar professionals have taken to overnight work hours, the shifts once associated with blue-collar workers in various trades or the manufacturing sector. Almost 50 percent of the 24 million American employees who work the so-called "graveyard shift" do so in white-collar positions, such as technology, finance, health care and call centers, according to Stoneham, Mass.-based Circadian Technologies Inc., a consulting firm specializing in night-time work issues. "One of the trends we've seen is that businesses that weren't quite 24/7 before are getting that way, and the number of white-collar jobs at night are increasing," Circadian Technologies founder and former Harvard medical professor Dr. Martin Moore-Ede recently told the Baltimore Sun. "The world is becoming 24 hours because the Internet changes the rules," says Gary Pudles, founder, CEO and president of Princeton, N.J.-based AnswerNet Network. Launched in 1998, AnswerNet Network operates 55 call centers in 22 states and Canada. "Consumers now want businesses and companies to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Pudles says. "One of the things the Internet has done is change expectations." People want to shop, conduct their banking, have health questions answered and manage credit-card accounts at all hours. The conventional 9-to-5 stereotype of white-collar workers is disappearing as professionals alter their workdays to accommodate round-the-clock demand, he says. "A lot of jobs no longer need to be done during traditional daytime hours." Functions such as accounting, transcription and e-mail management attract white-collar workers to overnight shifts, according to Pudles. "All kinds of business-process workers, the same workers who are also being outsourced overseas, are working overnight hours here," he says. At AnswerNet Network, there's no typical night-shift white-collar employee, he says. Employees vary across gender and age groups. Some employees are hired as day-shift workers and choose to move to night work. "Knowing they're willing to work overnight is a bonus," Pudles says. Other applicants are hired specifically for overnight shifts. Working at night offers some differences besides just the time change, he says, and it's not for everyone. "Some people have a very tough time adjusting their schedules," he says. "Sometimes their body clocks don't adjust. And some just miss the daylight." "Many [employees] are working alone so you have to like working alone," Pudles says. And overnight shifts tend to be somewhat unstructured. "There's less management supervision," he says. Best suited to such work are employees who work well independently. Management of an overnight workforce is critical, according to Pudles, who says, "It is important not to 'burn them [employees] out,' -- they need time to adjust to their altered schedule." Such employees, however, "like the flexibility of the schedule," Pudles says. "It gives you the whole day to do your thing." It's particularly beneficial to working parents, he says, who flip-flop schedules so that one parent works during the day and one works overnight, thus allowing one of them to always be available at home for their children. "It allows you to share parenting responsibilities more flexibly," Pudles says.
September 11, 2006 Copyright 2006© LRP Publications |
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