A drum I want to beat:
Overwork starts with management and planning, but half of why it happens is team culture.
Nobody has more impact on team culture than senior team members and lower-middle managers
If you are in the trenches and someone folks look to, then your example defines team culture.
Truly fixing these problems requires pro-worker legislation and fixing the current power imbalances.
But if you are a senior designer? You CAN control what you do personally, and what you do personally can make or break your more junior colleagues.
When someone is early in career and they see that all the senior and lead designers around them are crunching, answering emails outside of work hours, failing to maintain boundaries
That is what success looks like. Rather, those seniors and leads are making it look like that is required to succeed.
When they see a senior falling over themselves to apologize profusely for taking a sick day when they were throwing up, they hear loud and clear that it’s not acceptable to take sick days.
When they see that their lead is answering emails at midnight, they hear loud and clear that they are expected to read and respond to their emails at midnight.
When they see that people are missing important life events for work, they see that this team considers work more important than life.
It is MY stance that if you are a role model of any sort on a team, it is your moral duty to set and hold firm work/life boundaries, and never let them be crossed.
The juniors on a team can ONLY do this if their seniors are setting those boundaries first.
If you are someone who overworks because you don’t want to let your team down: You are in fact hurting your team. Here’s your permission to stop.
A few hours later…
I wanted to swing back to this thread and mention that despite my very inflexible-sounding opinions, I DO think that there can be a LOT of factors that change the impact this stuff can have.
My stance is mostly from the perspective of large-scale organizations, which are shorthand for having low agency, being evaluated by people who don’t know you, being held to inaccurate standards, being seen as replaceable, having more oppressive and impersonal systems generally.
I think the impact of work/life habits on the team and team culture can be very different in small studios.
…Having low agency, being evaluated by people who don’t know you, being held to inaccurate standards, being seen as replaceable, having more oppressive and impersonal systems generally.
I think the impact of work/life habits on the team and team culture can be very different in small studios.