You’ve probably heard of extreme sports; snowboarding, Iron Man triathlons, skydiving. Activities that attract admiration, demand the ultimate in endurance, deliver an adrenaline rush. Well, make way for “extreme jobs”, a similar phenomenon taking place in offices across the globe.
The word was first coined four years ago by a senior banker in London who worked a 70-hour week with frequent travel requirements across time zones, and constant pressure on performance. Rather than resent her hours in the office, however, she felt as exhilarated by it, as if she were bungee jumping, or mountaineering. “Work hard, play hard” is an awful cliché. Yet lots of people in the City use it as a great accolade. Add on ambitious professionals in the media, medicine, law and consulting, and you will gather that a lot of people are holding down extreme jobs.
Sixty-two per cent of America’s high-earning individuals work more than 50 hours a week, and 35% work more than 60 hours a week. What does a 60-hour week mean? With an hour-long commute each way, it means leaving the house at 7am and returning at 9pm, five days a week. We would call it Victorian-style hard labour. If it wasn’t so richly rewarded.
I once had a bit of an extreme job. As the arts correspondent for BBC News I would regularly put in a 60-hour week. Even though the job entailed an awful lot of glitz on the red carpet and a variety of posh frocks, (one of which excited Michael Buerk a lot), I hardly ever got home at what one might call a reasonable hour.
It was the same with the other correspondents. Overtime, weekend work or work on bank holidays was excused by a paragraph in our contracts. On the whole, nobody complained. Yes, the work was thoroughly exhilarating. But having three children while in harness at Television Centre was stressful. I went back to work when each was 11 weeks old. When I got to work, I would find myself watching the Tweenies on an office television, crying. I never knew when I was going to be home, and I was often away for weeks. I delivered all the magic and discovery of a newborn baby into the hands of a nanny, and it was tough.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, a professor at Columbia University, New York, spent a year “mapping” the world of extreme workers, with two surveys of high-earning professionals, one in the US and one in large multinational corporations in Europe, India and China.
First, she defines an extreme job as follows: “The job must entail at least 60 hours a week and five additional performance pressures.” She concludes that the 70-hour working week is “dangerously alluring. We didn’t find it unexpected that jobs have become more intense. The surprise was that people love their jobs to death. They really do feel fulfilled by them”. And yet, she says, extreme jobs come at a price. “Half of these people don’t have sex any more, because they are too exhausted. The fallout is wreaking havoc in private lives.”
Unsurprisingly, more men than women hold down extreme jobs. Less than 20% of people in the States with extreme jobs are women, and globally women make up a third of that group. Women, suggests Hewlett, are particularly aware of what long hours and intense pressure can do to a family. This is not because women are more caring per se than men, but because more men (25%) in extreme jobs, than women (12%) have the support of an at-home partner. ()
And so women are leaving in droves. “In our global survey, 80% of women in extreme jobs already had one foot out of the door,” says Hewlett. “And when women threaten to leave, they usually do.” She’s right. I left the BBC for a variety of reasons, one of which was that I wanted the experience of having a baby without the newsroom breathing down my neck. “You’re having another baby without the BBC’s maternity package?” a senior manager said to me with incredulity. Too right. You can hardly blame me for wanting to taste unalloyed motherhood. The Today Programme once called me for a piece of information when I was in the full throes of labour with my first child, who was born three hours later. If that isn’t extreme I don’t know what is.
Now I feel very fortunate. Working at home suits me perfectly. I can meet my deadlines but I can also go to the school play, take a child to a music exam or go to the library. Everyday I have lunch with my two youngest children. It’s bliss.
“The extreme job model is leaving women behind,” confirms Hewlett. “They are being forced out of these very good jobs much more readily than men. They are concerned about the impact of extreme jobs on their health, and they are desperately concerned about the fallout on their kids. Our data shows a pure portrait of guilt. Women draw a straight line between 70-hour weeks and something going wrong in their kids’ lives. That is a big trigger as to why they might leave these jobs.”
In her global survey, Hewlett discovered that 49% of women in extreme jobs feared that their child was watching too much television because of their long hours. Thirty-eight per cent worried that their offspring had issues with discipline; 34% worried about their children eating too much junk food; and 22% felt that, thanks to their long hours, their children were having too little adult supervision, and were underachieving at school. It’s understandable why so many women are dumping the smart suit and high heels, and charging home to make chocolate chip cookies.
Other voices chime in with these findings; Lucy Kellaway, the Financial Times columnist, wrote last week in The Economist, “to succeed in high-flying jobs in competitive global markets, will increasingly take dedication and talent and time. If you aren’t prepared to do your job extremely well, there will be someone in India or China, if not the next-door office, more than happy to do it for you. The main casualty will be women”.
In Kellaway’s view, women-friendly initiatives such as the work-life balance or flexi-time, have hit the corporate dustbin. “The image of the juggling part-time mother will belong to the past,” she writes. “Instead, the school gates will be filled with former bankers and lawyers, baking cakes while their husbands are making the money. The argument that it is better for mothers to stay at home, which made a small comeback in 2006, will take further hold.”
That’s altogether a bit defeatist for Hewlett, herself a mother of four and president of the Centre for Work-Life Policy, as well as a working academic. “I pulled together 33 companies, which jointly employ 3m people, and told them that unless we create radical alternatives to extreme jobs, women will be excluded,” she says. “And since white guys only make up 17% of the worldwide talent pool, that’s not a good competitive situation.”
Hewlett wants change, not to the overall capitalist model — which has given birth to the extreme job — but in its workplace. Unlike Kellaway, she thinks it’s achievable. “There is a convincing business case that one should retain female talent, and to do it we must reshape how we work,” she says.
Her secretary later e-mails me some of the best ideas doing the rounds at corporations where there are presumably hordes of “extremists”. American Express, the credit card company, is allowing high-performing individuals to take time out to work on “interesting projects”. Lehman Brothers, the investment bank, has made it possible for key managers to work from home, and established a programme that encourages women — and men — back to work after career breaks.
ProLogis, a global distribution company, which has offices in Denver as well as China, is actively trying to lessen the pressures on an employee base spread across 10 time zones. UBS, the bank, is piloting short-term global assignments to alleviate the stress of long-term relocation. The energy company BP is creating a protocol around communication technology to reduce overload of e-mails on staff. “And we should make sure people take their vacations,” says Hewlett. Roll on Christmas week.
LIFE AT THE LIMIT
Extreme jobs entail working 60 or more hours per week, and at least five of the following characteristics:
Responsibility for mentoring and recruiting Some of the resulting problems:
