Football coaching shares almost nothing in common with Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but while the end products are vastly different, the methods to their respective brands are madness are largely the same -- high-stress environments that either intrinsically or explicitly pressure their workers to sleep under their desks or get left behind.
In a study published in Harvard Business Review, assistant business professors Erin Reid and Laskhmi Ramajaran classified high-intensity workers into three groups: accepters, passers and revealers. Accepters, as the name would imply, accepted the life-consuming pressures of their work, surrendering their humanity to their paycheck. They were rewarded within the all-hands-on-deck-all-the-time culture of the company. (The authors mentioned a consulting firm that offered a reward to the employee that took the most flights in a year.) Passers gave the appearance of being revealers while reserving pieces of their lives for themselves. Revealers, meanwhile, had the audacity to admit their identity expanded beyond the four corners of their desk. And they often suffered for it.
But there is a cost to an organization full of accepters. First, research suggests productivity passes a point of diminishing returns around the 50 hour mark. According to a study by John Pencavel of Stanford, "attempts to quantify the relationship between hours worked and productivity found that employee output falls sharply after a 50-hour work-week, and falls off a cliff after 55 hours—so much so that someone who puts in 70 hours produces nothing more with those extra 15 hours."
Second, no matter how much one may try, humanity can not simply become engulfed by employment identity. "A majority of employees—men and women, parents and nonparents—find it difficult to stifle other aspects of themselves and focus single-mindedly on work. They grapple painfully with how to manage other parts of their lives. The solutions they arrive at may allow them to navigate the stresses, but they often suffer serious and dysfunctional consequences," Reid and Ramajaran write.
The so-called ideal worker, the authors argue, is actually less than ideal. Those who do surrender themselves wholly to work are often unable to cope with work-related setbacks (a virtual guarantee when working in football) and prove to be poor managers when dealing with people unlike them.
To combat this, the authors advise managers to cultivate their own non-work identities and, somewhat ironically, made the case for allowing their employees to focus less on work by arguing that it will benefit their work -- not because, you know, a paycheck is not a license to consume employees' persona lives. "One consultant whose firm had recently merged with another enterprise observed that none of his new colleagues ever stayed in the office past 5:30 PM," the pair wrote. "When he asked about this pattern, he was told: 'We don’t want our folks to spend every waking minute at work; we want them to be well-rounded individuals, to be curious, to see things out in the world, and to have all kinds of different experiences that they can then bring to bear on their work.'"
In the end, the philosophy for handling workers' non-work lives should be fairly simple: quality and efficiency of work over the quantity of time spent producing it, and treat your employees like the human beings they are. "The pressure to be an ideal worker is at an all-time high," the pair writes, "but so are the costs to both individuals and their employers.