We’ve all been in the position of feeling jealous of our boss. A nice, private office, posh company car and the ability to put long lunches down to “networking”- sounds ideal, right?
Well think again, because your boss could be one of the thousands putting in a staggering amount of unpaid overtime at the commercial property workplace, largely due to the unemployment crisis.
A survey, conducted by the Chartered Management Institute, showed that the average manager puts an average of nine weeks unpaid work into their commercial property workplace every year. Or, in other words, this amounts to 90 unpaid minutes per day.
Additionally, when asked whether they would resign from their commercial property workplace if they could find another job, one in three junior managers and directors did not hesitate to say they would.
Yet it appears that the extra hours in the office are having a more serious effect than causing extreme job dissatisfaction – they are also taking a toll on mental and physical health, as well as disrupting personal life.
In fact 43 per cent of the 1,334 participants taking part in the survey said that a “culture” of refusing to take sick days unless absolutely necessary had emerged. This is due, they believe, to many workplace managers fearing that taking days off, even for illness, means they risk losing their job. Cases of depression were also remarkably high, with one in five having suffered from it in the past year as a result of spending longer and longer hours at their commercial property workplace.
It was a similar story with stress, with 42 per cent of participants dealing with the effects, and six in ten having suffered from insomnia in the past three months despite feeling “constantly tired.”
Of course, the unemployment and economic situation in the country right now are playing a major role in the stress levels of commercial property bosses – as the economic downturn continues, the deteriorating health of this group continues to spiral out of control.
Professor Les Worrall, from Coventry University’s faculty of business, says; “The scale and impact of change over the last five years has been staggering as all of our key measures from the survey have deteriorated markedly since 2007.
“What is more worrying is that there seems to be no sign of economic conditions getting better – we are in for a worrying time if these trends persist into the future.”
Yet these issues, while undoubtedly disadvantageous for the commercial property managers and directors in question, may be having a more serious effect upon their families. Two thirds of office managers who have children admitted that their working hours “had a negative effect on their relationship with their children.” Many of these managers also stated that they often got home too late to see their children awake from one week end to the next.
With Britain’s bosses becoming more and more stressed, and the economy looking unlikely to pick up until well into the future, the question of what can be done must be raised. As depression, stress and physical health problems all have a detrimental effect upon commercial workplace productivity; managers and directors may be putting in longer hours but having far less output, in fact damaging their chances of retaining their positions. And with additional stress due to guilt over family life, it seems that the days of longer lunches and management perks are all over for this group.
Are you the manager or director of a commercial property workplace? Do you agree that the past five years have been becoming gradually more and more stressful, or do you manage to escape the confines of the office without the average 90 minutes per day overtime stated in the study?
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