Drowning in work? Whose fault is that?

“IF HE felt pressure, it was self-generated; it was not imposed on him.”

That’s the response of Goldman Sachs Group to an employee suing the firm for damages over a stressful working environment. The statement, as quoted in legal documents filed by the firm, continues: “If he did work excessive hours, this was not because it was required or expected of him.”

The former employee bringing the suit is no newcomer to office life but a 55-year-old London-based executive who headed the firm’s global recruiting office between 2018 and 2021. He claims the firm’s “relentless” workload, “bullying culture” and lack of support led to heart problems and thoughts of suicide.

Goldman not only calls the claims meritless, but also argues that the employee ignored advice from his bosses to cut his “self-imposed workload”.

I don’t know whose version is closer to the truth, and I have no idea who is more likely to prevail in a court of law. But Goldman’s line strikes me as a pretty thin excuse – albeit a common one in client-services firms.

The whole point of company culture is to get employees to internalise the organisation’s expectations.

A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU

Friday, 3 pm

Thrive

Money, career and life hacks to help young adults stay ahead of the curve.

Sign Up

And elite employers intentionally seek out employees who are strongly self-motivated and self-disciplined; those who, in other words, excel at putting pressure on themselves.

They usually consider such personality traits a feature, not a bug. Unless the employee burns out, of course, at which point they’ll be referred for coaching or to the firm’s (useless) wellness programme.

“Culture is the tacit social order of an organisation,” write Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg and his colleagues in Harvard Business Review. “People are effectively hardwired to recognize and respond to it instinctively. It acts as a kind of silent language.”

Put simply, it’s the unwritten rules of a group.

Goldman is famous (some might say infamous) for having a hard-driving culture. It’s far from alone. White-shoe law firms and the major consulting firms also have a reputation for pushing talented people extremely hard.

Goldman has ostensibly tried over the years to rein it in – restricting the intern workday in 2015, for example, to a mere 17 hours, and, in 2022, imposing mandatory time off. 

But it seems clear that there’s an unspoken assumption that truly allowing more work-life balance would sacrifice the firm’s ultimate goal: “exceptional performance and superior results” for its clients.

Good luck to the employee swimming against the tide. “It’s hard to challenge cultural norms driving how, when and where you are expected to work,” says Cali Williams Yost, a flexible work strategist and author of Work + Life: Finding the Fit That’s Right For You. “Especially if those expectations are worn broadly as a badge of honour.”

And honour is the operative word. Yes, clients pay enormous sums to services firms on the expectation of fast results. But intense commitment isn’t necessarily rewarded with higher compensation. While investment bankers are highly paid, there are plenty of fields in which professionals put in long hours and earn relatively little.

When the culture of a company or a profession associates long hours with professional honor, it can become what scholars call a “masculinity contest” – where long hours are venerated for their association with stamina. Those cultures are notoriously resistant to change, unless the firm develops a serious reputational problem – of the kind that would truly scare away clients or recruits.

When a culture is so ingrained, it really becomes hard for an individual employee to buck the system without seeming, well, dishonorable. Or soft.

Nonetheless, those who struggle in intense environments such as the one described in the Goldman lawsuit often blame themselves. I just couldn’t hack it. Maybe there is something wrong with me. So completely has the employee internalised the company’s culture that normal human needs – sleep, food, exercise, friendship, family – are seen as fatal flaws.

So, do some employees at firms like Goldman suffer under enormous amounts of self-imposed pressure? Doubtlessly. But that’s precisely why elite firms hire them. BLOOMBERG

The writer was previously an executive editor at Harvard Business Review