80 Hours and Counting

I heard recently about a mid-career lawyer who is a partner in a small, boutique litigation firm, and who began her career in a large firm setting. Though now well-established in her career, she still arrives at the office early each morning and rarely leaves before midnight. Those who work with her understand that this is the expectation for them as well. I suspect she’s not at all unusual in these habits and expectations.

That’s never been my approach to work and so I struggle to understand both the motivation for that kind of work-life imbalance and how it benefits either the lawyer or her clients. I know that my own productivity dips seriously after 8 hours at my desk, even if I’ve taken a few breaks. That experience makes me wonder how effective other lawyers are when they’re working 12 or more hours in a day, and even more, whether clients are receiving any value at all when their work is done at the end of their lawyer’s long day.

In fact, this dip in productivity is borne out by recent research that reveals a sharp drop in gains after 50 hours per week and after 55 hours, no additional gains in productivity at all.

Even if productivity did not decline, I can’t help but wonder about how individuals manage their 80-hour workweeks. Fortunately, someone else wondered that too. In her research published last month, Erin Reid of Boston University explains how at least some are managing this work-heavy lifestyle.

The Upshot blog post How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek and Why it Matters reports on Reid’s research into the work habits of members of an international consulting firm with a workplace culture that emphasize long hours and prompt responsiveness to its clients. Reid found there were, within the 100 consultants interviewed, three broad groupings:

Some people fully embraced this culture and put in the long hours, and they tended to be top performers. Others openly pushed back against it, insisting upon lighter and more flexible work hours, or less travel; they were punished in their performance reviews.

The third group is most interesting. Some 31 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women whose records Ms. Reid examined managed to achieve the benefits of a more moderate work schedule without explicitly asking for it.

They made an effort to line up clients who were local, reducing the need for travel. When they skipped work to spend time with their children or spouse, they didn’t call attention to it. One team on which several members had small children agreed among themselves to cover for one another so that everyone could have more flexible hours.

It was this third group that caught my attention. Essentially, they are essentially faking it, or “passing,” to use Reid’s language. Their colleagues, or at least their superiors, for the most part, see them as buying fully into the corporate culture of long hours, while they are traveling under the radar with a much more balanced approach to work and the rest of life.

This begs the question, if it’s possible to work less time and still get the job done to the clients’ satisfaction, why isn’t everyone doing so?

Given it’s not productive to work longer hours beyond a certain point, and that at least some employees don’t or won’t buy in, why does this culture of success through long hours persist? Why do so many firms, whether in the legal profession or outside it, place such value on working long hours, often measuring success on the basis of perceived devotion to the work?

The Upshot post goes on to note that:

…the fact that the consultants who quietly lightened their workload did just as well in their performance reviews as those who were truly working 80 or more hours a week suggests that in normal times, heavy workloads may be more about signaling devotion to a firm than really being more productive. The person working 80 hours isn’t necessarily serving clients any better than the person working 50.

In other words, maybe the real problem isn’t men faking greater devotion to their jobs. Maybe it’s that too many companies reward the wrong things, favoring the illusion of extraordinary effort over actual productivity.

Reid herself suggests that:

…a critical implication of this research is that working long hours is not necessary for high quality work. The experiences of those men who passed show clearly that, even in a client service setting, it is possible to reorganize work such that it is more predictable and consumes fewer hours.

In the legal profession, the emphasis on billable hours persists despite what you may have read about the necessity for change in this area. Such conventions perpetuate the mindset that more hours worked will yield greater success. Yet, typical billable hour targets put lawyers in a position of conflict, struggling to balance the desire for greater income with their ability to deliver competent service and quality products to clients.

Knowing that more time doesn’t necessarily produce a better product for the client and knowing that it’s possible to work less while achieving the same quality of results, why wouldn’t we change? Why don’t we change?