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I knew a guy who loved his job. Odds are high it killed him.
No one can prove it, of course. Heart attacks are multivariate events. There’s exercise and diet and age and genetics and sometimes just plain bad luck. So the company’s do-more-with-less initiative may not have contributed to his ultimate involuntary termination.
He might have gained the weight he carried in his final years even if he had more time to exercise. And, c’mon, who can’t find time to get in an hour at the gym no matter how long the workweek? There are pills for high cholesterol. Let’s not forget the company had a wellness program enforced with as much leverage as any employer outside the military could exercise. The soda was taken out of the lunchroom. These things happen. Even the guy’s doctor said sometimes the first symptom of this kind of heart problem is death.
So, no, we can’t hang the demise of this guy — and you know who he is because we all knew one — on the company’s leave-it-all-on-the-field culture. The guy loved his job. No one made him stay late. It’s not the firm’s fault that, until his family filled out the special form on LinkedIn, his colleagues kept getting reminders of work anniversaries he never reached.
To blame the company is not fair, because we can’t say for sure what really killed him. Let’s not forget, the executives loved him, too. Employees that invested in the company’s mission, that good with customers, that eloquent in bringing to life the firm’s message, don’t come around very often. After his funeral, they even named a conference room for him.
But here’s the thing about statistical patterns: What can’t be proved in the specific can be hauntingly undeniable in the aggregate.
And so it was that one more defense of the incrementalist excuses of workaholic employees and hard-charging leaders fell this month when the European Heart Journal published a study of 85,494 working men and women around 43 years old. Ten years in, those employees suffered 1,061 new cases of atrial fibrillation, a malady marked by the heart’s upper chambers beating out of sync with the lower chambers. The two most common complications of “Afib” are stroke and heart failure. Sometimes it leads to “multi-infarct dementia,” a series of small strokes interrupting blood flow to and knocking out parts of the brain.
The researchers compared the length of the employee’s typical workweek with the incidence of Afib. “After adjustment for age, sex and socioeconomic status, individuals working long hours (over 55 hours per week) had a 1.4-fold increased risk of atrial fibrillation compared with those working standard hours,” the researchers concluded. In other words, working long hours more than doubles the risk of Afib.
This latest study did not shock the medical world. It was only the latest in a massive body of evidence that the longer and more stressful the job, the more it debilitates and sometimes kills the employee.
The grand irony of employers’ efforts to get their workers to wear Fitbits and use calorie-counting apps is that those electronics inevitably show what health researchers have long known — that exceptional pressure from the job is frequently one of the greatest hazards to an employee’s well-being.
We already knew job stress messes up a person’s sleep - and that poor sleep is linked to increased accidents at work, lower job performance, greater absenteeism, and more doctor visits, to the tune of $100 billion. We already knew that working in a windowless office cuts three-quarters of an hour off an employee’s night of sleep. The evidence had already accumulated that, as The Washington Post reported, “having a bad boss can make your work life a misery, but it can also make you sick, both physically and mentally” (which means the reverse is also true: having a great boss can help you avoid these illnesses). The same iPhone that ensures someone’s work e-mail follows her to bed can also be used to graph the restless night she had thinking about those e-mails or falling ill from a case of bad manager.
We already knew the stress hormone cortisol shoots up more on a workday than on a day off. We knew that daily overdoses of the stuff could contribute to “metabolic syndrome, atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, immunosuppression and an increased risk of coronary heart disease” or even make cuts heal slower.
We already knew that different levels of stress in different departments of an organization are “a dominant primary factor accounting for 44% of the variance in residualized, aggregated medical claims.” One of the authors of that 2016 study, University of Louisville Associate Professor Brad Shuck, put it bluntly at an event in May where we both spoke. “I can tell what department you work for based on your health care claims,” he said. “That shouldn't happen!”
So, while we can never say precisely that a given person’s job contributed to his or her stroke or heart attack, it is indisputable that long or stressful jobs contribute to many people’s strokes and heart attacks. The reverse is also indisputable. Jobs that stay within what the latest study calls “standard hours” preserve employees’ health.
There is also no confusion about the remedy. If you’re an employee, set limits. You’re mortal and you ignore that mortality at your own risk. Even a great job can be dangerous if not kept within bounds.
If you’re an employer, organize your jobs to put less pressure on people and, once in a while, tell them to go home. The research says working too many hours is foolish, as is expecting employees to work that long. The push for longer hours and employees wearing overwork as a badge of honor are now so common, states one summary of the evidence, “that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive - and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.”
I know another guy who loves his job. Odds are it’s made him healthier. Maybe it even saved his life.
His company also has a wellness program, but its foundation is a culture where people come to the office, work hard and go home on time. If he wants to take a long lunch break to go for a run or hit the gym, no one questions his work ethic. He sometimes works a long week, but he gets the chance to recover the following week. His manager rarely emails or calls on evenings or weekends. He can work remotely when needed. He’s encouraged to use all his vacation.
He’s more effective at this pace — more productive, more creative, less at risk of getting in an accident — happier. His cholesterol is under control with diet and exercise.
Most important, when his LinkedIn profile automatically generates a notice to his network that he’s having a work anniversary, he’s still around to mark it.
