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Mandatory Overtime Can Be a Problem and a Half
By Richard Hadden and Bill Catlette
It happens. Flu epidemics hit. Nature wreaks havoc. And heaven forbid, but sometimes the demand for your product exceeds your most optimistic forecasts. When unexpected problems arise, whether they're good problems or bad ones, you need everyone to put their shoulders to the grindstone and put in some extra effort…and time. Overtime.
The recent high profile US cases of United Air Lines and Verizon have merely heightened interest in the issue of mandatory overtime, a problem that's plagued business since long before the Wright Brothers ever made their first phone call.
Overtime is a business reality and therefore an occasional necessity. We can't forecast our exact labor requirements with any more certainty than we can predict the weather, though it's not for lack of scientific models in either case. Nobody wants mandatory overtime any more than they want layoffs, but business cycles being what they are, anyone determined to completely avoid either extreme of labor demand probably needs to find work on another planet.
But it's also a business reality that people can't work extra hours week after week and month after month before they, and your customers, (maybe you call them passengers, or patients) start to feel it where it hurts.
When what starts as an emergency provision becomes a routine requirement, then let's face it, we as managers have failed to do what we're paid to do, that is, to manage. We alienate our employees, disappoint our customers, and drive away our stockholders, who inevitably pay the price.
Requiring people to work excessive numbers of hours on an ongoing basis is certainly your prerogative, but it's not a very smart way to do business. If you're feeling the effects of the unusually tight labor market, a sweatshop reputation won't do much to help you attract the best and the brightest.
Unpredictable work schedules make it nearly impossible for even the most responsible employees to manage child care. We certainly want to know that our kids are OK while we're working. And we don't know about you, but when they're at work, we want our employees' minds fully engaged in their work, not worrying about their kids.
Fatigue breeds mistakes. It causes people to turn out faulty tires, make poor decisions, and say nasty things to your best customers. It keeps hospital patients in the hospital longer and causes truck drivers to overturn their rigs, spilling their blood, not to mention your products, all over the highway.
To put things in proper perspective, bear in mind that the real issue at United and Verizon was not mandatory overtime. Both companies and their employees have been at war for years. Mandatory overtime represents simply one more border skirmish in a childish quest to prove who's really in charge.
Which brings us to a third business reality: no company whose forces are marshaled against itself can ever hope to defeat the competition.
Mandatory overtime, or any issue that makes your employees mad enough, leads to the kind of unwelcome publicity visited upon United and Verizon in the summer of 2000. Long after consumers have forgotten United CEO James Goodwin's contrite on-air apology and made-for-TV crocodile tears, they'll remember the five-year-old on the Verizon picket line holding the sign that read “Where's My Mommy?"
It doesn't matter much that many state governors will be faced with mandatory overtime legislation soon. The point is that without the willing participation of your workforce, all the legislation in the world won't help you win customers.
There are things employers can do to reduce the need for this costly form of labor and at the same time make it more palatable when the need for overtime arises.
1) Hire enough people to maintain ordinary operations. Know the difference between a temporary fluctuation and a permanent condition. Don't ask employees to pay for management's mistakes. Some of you are understaffed, and you know it. You hope your employees won't notice. They've noticed. You think it's saving you money. It's not. If you can't find enough people to work for you, take meaningful action to improve your workplace reputation.
2) Take some of the extra you spend on overtime premium and put it into better forecasting.
3) Bring in temporary or leased workers in non-core functions to cover truly temporary upsurges in activity.
4) Tell the truth. If overtime is expected, be clear about it up front, during the interview if not before. If you plan to ask your workforce to work overtime, don't shave your estimate of how long you'll need it. It's a fraud to say you'll need it for three months when you know it's going to be six. It reminds me of the phone repairman who told me he'd be at my home on Wednesday afternoon, just to appease me, when he knew he couldn't make it until Thursday morning. Wonder where he learned that?
5) Some of your people desperately want overtime. Explore all avenues with the willing before imposing it on the reluctant.
6) If you tell people that overtime is optional, not required, make valiant efforts to be sure they're not subject to blatant or subtle sanctions for exercising the choice you gave them.
7) Ask your workforce to help you figure this one out. Provided you're not just trying to squeeze people for all they're worth, your employees will see this as everyone's problem, and in some cases, a good problem to have. Solicit their ideas and active involvement, and then do what makes sense.
Finally, whether the issue is mandatory overtime, outsourcing jobs, or any other point of disagreement, if you and your workforce are constantly at each other's throats, you've simply got to figure out how to get along. Plenty of good companies have done it, with issues as strenuous as these. If you don't, the market is going to make you go to your respective rooms, while your competitors get to play…and play to win.
Please print the following attribution for this article: Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden, co-authors of Contented Cows Give Better Milk, help clients clobber the competition by having a focused, fired up, and capably led workforce. They deliver powerful conference keynotes and leadership training. They can be reached at 800-940-7006 (+1-904-720-0870 from outside North America) or www.ContentedCows.com.