Canadian research highlights trend of overwork, devotion to both work and family
The COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant rise in remote and hybrid work models is enabling workers to devote equal amounts of time and energy to their jobs and families, according to new research from the University of Waterloo.
This “dual devotion” means that both women and men are working more hours, which might make employers happy in the short term but will have long term consequences.
“In the short term, it's probably beneficial because they're getting more work hours out of their employees. But long term, it's not necessarily sustainable,” said Kim De Laat, Assistant Professor of Organization and Human Behaviour at Waterloo’s School of Interaction Design and Business.
“People are going to reach a point where their mental health suffers and something has to give, so in the long term we might expect that it could cost employers if we have folks requesting to go on leave or just burnt out and unable to meet their job demands.”
Dual devotion: a new approach to work life balance
Whereas devotion to family and devotion to work used to be seen as an “either-or” choice made by employees, the shift to remote and hybrid work has led to a “both-and” approach which is being made by both mothers and fathers, de Laat’s research revealed.
And their approaches are very gendered – according to de Laat’s study, men are using their increased flexible time to spend more time caring for their children, and women use it to devote more time to their careers. For the research, they were asked about their personal goals and career plans, their use and perceptions of flexible work arrangements, and what they thought makes a good worker and a good parent.
“Women are increasingly both working full-time and having families, and at the same time that this has happened … there's been a lot of shifts in how men relate to fatherhood and it's far more common these days for men to be more engaged with their fathering role,” said de Laat.
“I thought this provided a really interesting opportunity to explore whether this sense of devotion to work and family is still experienced as either-or, and of course, what I found is that no, it’s ‘both, and,’ and a lot of the folks I spoke to report being super engaged with family life with their kids, but also really ambitious, and this was the case both for women and men.”
Opposite approaches to dual devotion
To determine how remote workers are using their more flexible schedules, de Laat interviewed 41 women and 43 men, all IT workers, who worked at the same company for annual salaries from $70,000 to $110,000.
What de Laat found is that employees are able to use flexible working models to address guilt about not being able to “do it all”.
Women are able to continue their proportionally-larger roles in the household while addressing guilt about not devoting enough time to their paid work, and men spend more time with their children, addressing guilt about not being good parents.
However, neither group is lessening their previous commitments, whether it be to work or to family, resulting in overwork across the board; “These findings support the argument that flexible work arrangements, ostensibly designed to reconcile work/family conflict, facilitate work intensification,” de Laat wrote in her report.
“In both cases, employers win since neither men nor women are sacrificing overwork as they remain highly involved in childcare and housework.”
How to prevent overwork from dual devotion in remote workers
A large part of the problem is stigma that both groups experience from employers when attempting to prioritize family life, de Laat said. Pressure from bosses and colleagues leads to parents pushing themselves to “do it all” or risk consequences at work.
Employers and HR need to be more proactive about offering opportunities to disconnect from work, as well as providing fair parental leave to fathers without retaliation.
“They still fear that stigma that is associated with requesting flexibility, because historically, it is something that has been stigmatized, and people have been penalized for using it either in terms of being discounted for promotions, or being mommy-tracked, being perceived as less committed to their work,” de Laat said, pointing out that while there is only currently “right to disconnect” legislation in place in Ontario and Quebec, that doesn’t mean employers can’t take matters into their own hands.
“Employers don't have to wait for provincial legislation to enact these laws, they can establish their own right to disconnect, just from an organizational policy level, to ensure that people are granted some peace outside of their working hours,” she explained.
“It's not an easy thing to implement, but there has to be some type of promotion of this idea that outside of your core 7 ½ or 8 hours, whatever you're paid to work, there should be no expectation that you take on work-related emailing."
