How does management view the sole employee on the team who works for 15 hours a day?
Managers are tempted to view such an employee as productive. A 15-hour-employee is seen as one who is pulling most of the weight and is touted as the standard for others to follow. Since employee output is difficult to measure, they default instead to measuring input.
Yet, good managers have a different perspective. They view a 15-hour-employee as a symptom of management failure. A person who consistently works hours that long does so at a great cost to their health and team morale. The quality of their decisions plummets and their long hours causes their entire team to work longer and pick up the pieces. It is a manager’s responsibility to prevent this downward spiral.
Managers are often blind to the second perspective, for it exposes their own inadequacy, the hotspots of which are the management consulting firms where 15-hour-workdays are the norm.
Observations 