Why You Shouldn’t Overwork Your Team

We’ve all heard of this, “work smarter, not harder”.  We spend quite a bit of effort into planning our work days.  We want to make it manageable for us so that we can enjoy the other things in life.  We want time with our family and friends.  There also need to be time for our hobbies and socializing.  Yet when it comes to managing employees, leaders tend to regularly push their team to work overtime.  They put production deadline above all.  But there are legitimate reasons why you shouldn’t overwork your team.

In the competitive environment, it’s not easy to avoid over working.  We want to push ourselves and our team to achieve our objectives.  At times, just achieving the preset objective is not enough.  We have to over achieve in order to be successful.  Inevitably, it means we have to overwork.  We have to push our teams to work more and work harder to over achieve.  Overtime requirements becomes the norm.  We even expect our team to sacrifice their weekends.  All these efforts and sacrifices are in the pursuit of greater productivity.

It’s completely understandable that we want to be successful.  There’s nothing wrong with working hard and striving to achieve your objectives.  What we fail to realize is that overworking doesn’t necessarily give us the production we seek.  There is actually research done by Stanford University which proves that overworking is bad for productivity.  You can find that research here http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf.   

According to the research done by Stanford University on productivity of working hours, there are many reasons why we shouldn’t be overworking.  Here are some of the main reasons why we shouldn’t overwork our teams.

1. Fatigue – This is quite obvious but still must be acknowledge. We are all tired after a full day of work.  Having to work overtime adds to that fatigue.  If it’s just once in a while, it’s not an issue.  But daily overtime work hours will severely effect anyone. Pile on working over the weekend can lead to long term damage.
2. Illness – As just mentioned, long term fatigue leads to long term damage. And it will lead to illness which sometimes are difficult and expensive to treat.  At the end, the success and any gains made would have to be used to pay for the treatments.
3. Accidents – Not being in the proper mindset to work could be dangerous. When we’re overworked, we tend to miss things.  We may also be uncharacteristically careless.  Accidents are understandable.  We may hurt ourselves or even other team members accidentally.
4. Moral – When people are tired and overworked, they are generally unhappy. This puts a real damper on individual and team moral.  All they see and experience is lots of work and issues stemming from the extra work.
5. Quality – Being overworked and fatigued will lead to quality issues. People do not tend to produce good quality products when they’re not at their best.  Quality is a proven sacrifice with overworked employees.
6. Productivity – In the pursuit for greater productivity, pushing our teams to overwork was proven to be quite opposite to what we want. In the research, the data shows that the productivity of workers are reduced when overworking consistently over a long period of time.  This seems to be counter intuitive, but yet it makes sense.  And the data confirms it.

As leaders it’s normal that we want to achieve success and bring success to our team.  It’s understandable that we motivate and push our team to work harder to achieve our objectives.  And we should be striving for success and challenging our teams to work harder and do more.  However, we also must be aware that there’s a limit to that.  If we cross that limit and overwork our team too much, we will have the opposite effect.  Productivity will drop and the well-being of the individual as well as the team will be in jeopardy.  Balance our push for success with the health of our teams.  In the long run, we will achieve much more success that way.

Picture by: Mikael Blomkvist