Ronald Reagan ever said, "It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?" To some extent, extra effort seems to be self-defeating. Studies suggest that, after 50 hours a week, employee productivity falls sharply.
But that doesn't stop some managers from demanding that workers stay chained to their desk for long periods. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, recently praised the "996" model, where employees work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week, as a "huge blessing". Apparently, presenteeism (出勤主义) is the curse of the modern office worker.
There will be days when you do not have much to do: perhaps because you are waiting for someone else in a different department, or a different company, to respond to a request. As the clock ticks past 5 pm, there may be no purpose in staying at your desk. But you can see your boss hard at work and, more importantly, they can see you. So you make an effort to look busy.
Some of this may be a self-continuing cycle. If bosses do not like to go home before their employees, and employees fear leaving before their bosses, everyone is trapped. Staff may feel that they will not get a pay rise, or a promotion, if they are not seen to be putting in maximum effort. This is easily confused with long hours. Managers, who are often no good at judging employees' performance, use time in the office as a measure. The consequence is often wasted effort. We pretend to work and managers pretend to believe us. Rather than work hard, you try to make bosses think that you are. Leaving a jacket on your office chair, walking around purposefully with a notebook and sending out emails at odd hours are three of the best-known tricks. After a while this can result in collective self-delusion that this pretence is actual work.
But presenteeism has more serious consequences. It is perhaps most common in Japan, where people attend the office even when they are in discomfort. In doing so, they are doing neither themselves nor their employers any favours. As well as reducing productivity, this can increase medical expenses for the employer. According to a study in the Journal of Occupation and Environmental Medicine, these costs can be six times higher for employers than the costs of absenteeism among workers. Those workers were more likely to experience greater pain and to suffer from depression.
In the evolution of humanity, presenteeism is a recent phenomenon. In the industrial era, workers were paid not for their output but for their time, and were required to clock in and out. But modern machinery like smartphones and laptops is portable. Turning an office into a prison, with prisoners allowed home for the evenings, does nothing for the creativity that is increasingly demanded of office workers as routine tasks are automated. To be productive you need presence of mind, not being present in the flesh.
