Smash hit

Missing family meals, putting the children to bed or drinks with friends weakens relationships. “If you disinvest in these outside relationships you can’t turn to them in times of stress, and then your stress feeds back to work,” says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at the Lancaster University Management School.

Time outside work to simply rest or do things that make you more healthy, such as going to the gym or exercise, are also key, says Cooper.

So who is doing the overtime? Nearly two-thirds of managers and supervisors work overtime, as do more than four-fifths of senior managers. Among the higher ranked, more than one in four put in between 10 and 20 hours, 6.5% do more than 20 hours extra a week and 1.7% more than 30.

“The thing that bothers me is that these people are in charge, and half of them are going to be exhausted,” says Bradon. “Of the people who work up to 30 hours extra a week, more than half feel under too much pressure to perform well,” he says.

Twice as many men do more than 10 hours extra work a week. Bradon believes women are better than men at ensuring they have a good work-life balance and that companies can, and should, have few staff doing overtime.

Tania Heap, UK human resources director at Mott MacDonald, agrees that a little job satisfaction goes a long way. The management, engineering and development consultancy ranked eighth in this year’s 20 Best Big Companies to Work For list. “Typically, engineering is a vocation. There are times we get very busy and it’s all hands to the pump, but it’s because we want to, not because someone is standing over us,” Heap says.

Bradon adds: “All the evidence from research is that people working fewer hours are really productive. The top 10% of companies seem to have learnt this lesson.”

At Erith Group, where no staff reported stress-related symptoms in the previous 12 months, few people are found in the office after 5.30pm. The family-owned demolition business, founded in 1967, that also specialises in clearing up contaminated land, ranked 29th in this year’s list of Best Small Companies to Work For.

“We don’t have a long hours culture,” says Michael Lynch, head of business development. “The firm has a family approach to business. Respect for people is its underlying ethos.”

Loop Customer Management is a mid-sized firm with 88.3% of staff working no overtime. It is vital that phones are manned during the busiest periods in this call centre environment, but “we only use overtime when something happens we don’t expect. It is a short-term fix, not something we rely on long-term”, says Zoe Mason, head of customer services.

Mason points out the correlation between staff who do a lot of overtime and those who are often ill.

“Certainly there is a business case for valuing the work-life balance,” says Ben Willmott, employee relations adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. “If people feel they are not achieving that balance, they will move on. The way to address the long hours culture is to ensure you have high-performance practices in place, such as effective teamworking, performance-related pay and good line managers who ensure people feel valued and will go the extra mile,” Willmott adds.

Business services specialist PricewaterhouseCoopers sees flexibility as a way of helping employees cope with hours which can be long and unpredictable. “It isn’t ‘one-size-fits-all’. Depending on the kind of work you do, there’s a type of flexibility to suit you,” says Sarah Churchman, human resources director (diversity and inclusion). “Employees get a sense of empowerment from doing the work when it suits them, as long as it gets done by the deadline.”

Unlike an office-based job, working in a hospice such as St Wilfrid’s puts emotional pressures on staff. Chief executive Moorey says that dealing with life and death on a daily basis encourages a sensible perspective on work-life balance. Overtime just isn’t part of the working culture at St Wilfrid’s, she emphasises. “Work is important, but it isn’t your life.”

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