What the HR department can do against the ongoing over -work crisis

Maybe you saw the story in the last week Wall Street Journal This described the terrible experience of the Junior Banker at BAIRD Investment Bank, which worked for 110 hours or more per week. (In the event that you have not thought about it lately, there are only 168 hours a week.) To work so much in a five -day working week would be 22 hours a day. Some of these junior bankers were admitted to the hospital in the end and conjured up the Japanese term “Karoshi” or death.

Depending on how old they are, their reactions are probably very different. At least one of my first thoughts was there for a while: “Wait a minute. That is a Medium west Bank. I thought the Wall Street should be where junior analysts were worked on an inhumane level. “

My second and more sober reaction: This is at least the third time in my adult life, over three decades that have been broken about -which is broken -what is after normal standards -in the human workload of young people who begin their career in investment banking. Every time the story takes place in the same way: The junior people are worried that this is not normal because they see – or more likely that they will hear in social media – people that they (vague) remember before they have started in these jobs, to see friends, do things they think they were normal.

They don't want to complain because they don't want to look weak. When a junior person asks, they hear that this is what the older people had to do when they started that this is an important part of learning and other rationalizations. The bosses that drive them longer and harder are not the leaders of the bank, but the recently advertised superiors and their medium -sized managers.

The rules were usually set up from the last crisis on overloads in 80 hours and on Wall Street on Saturdays. But the rules are routinely broken. Then one of these young employees dies and it is a story that is too big to ignore.

The fact that this is a bank in the middle west means that the over -work crisis is now clearly an industry -wide problem and not just a problem of Wall Street.

Organizational priorities: profits or people?

The obvious question is why this happens over and over again. A new overload scandal breaks down every decade, there are many Harrumphing of high -ranking managers, some people are released and new restrictions are introduced. This is exactly what happens to Baird. Ten years later we will be here again.

Outsiders will surely ask: Where was the HR department in all of this? You would think that would be the punch line here, but everyone who read this probably also knows the answer: in the background, in the background, they were undoubtedly angered to hear the complaints of the few juniors who believe that the task of HR protects them – but they were powerless to do something about it.

When we hear that people say that culture is the problem, they refer to examples like Baird. But what does a cultural problem mean? It means that the value and priority of the organization is to do the work. As long as you meet you, more challenges will come in your way and finally there will be a reward. If anything gets in a way, including rules, you have to deal with.

See also: hybrid work and health of employees: fewer days of illness, less stress

Another way to say that: the organization's managers do not support any restrictions that the employees would protect enough to create them. Instead, it is a priority to do business. In principle, you could support restrictions to reduce the revision, but in practice you would not sacrifice business for you.

HR's role in combating the revision

Does the HR department have less influence on these organizations than elsewhere? It is probably more fair to say that you have a stronger priority for doing work at any price. It could also be easier to see them as available because so few of these junior people stay with their companies.

In my experience, things have changed very little in the past 50 years. Most of the revision is actually not that much that Crowd work, but the result of a lack of management. Junior people have the feeling that they have to hang around, even if there is nothing to do, only in the event that their boss drops something. It is not just the protection of the employees that is the problem. There are some efforts to think about more effective management.

One thing that has changed is that these banking jobs are no longer the most desirable jobs for business school graduates. This is partly due to the fact that the management of new employees in consulting companies – the main competitor – has improved so much. So there is a price that has to be paid for revisions – only for some organizations not big enough.