The Desk

Leadership

That's Not a Badge of Honor

We turned long hours into something to brag about. That's the part of the old work ethic worth dropping.

A wall clock in the foreground of a dim open-plan office where people still work at their desks, while one person walks out toward the dusk-lit exit.

We finally have a new Senate President in Win Gatchalian. And in the nomination speech, Migs Zubiri told a story about him.

He said Gatchalian’s staff often complain to the other senators about the long hours and the weekends. They’ve half-joked that they wished Win had a girlfriend, so he wouldn’t keep them working so late. Zubiri said Win was the first man in and the last man out of the Senate. He said it like it was a badge of honor.

My wife and I looked at each other, and I said out loud, “that is not a badge of honor.” Not anymore. Not for millennials and Gen-Z.

Let me be clear about what I mean, because hard work is not the problem and I’m not knocking it. What no longer stands is the obsession with the clock. First man in, last man out. Who logged in early, who logged out late, who stayed the latest. Counting the hours like the hours themselves are the achievement. That is the old way of doing things.

When I started working, the old school sales guys had a label for people who left the office at 5:01 PM. “Levis yan.” And everyone would laugh. I’ll admit it. In that multinational, I usually left at 6:30 or later, and I was part of the people who made fun of the ones who left on time. That’s how I was brought up, because that’s what the culture was.

Fast forward ten years. I’m further along in my career, same multinational, but now I’m working at their European HQ. And the narrative is completely flipped. There, the people who stay and work overtime are the ones labeled with prejudice. People say if you have to work overtime, it means you’re not efficient during your official working hours. In that office, a man whose staff complained about his hours would not have been called first in and last out. He would have been a question about workload, or about whether the work was being managed well.

There was also a very practical reason to leave at 5: the stores closed at 6. It didn’t matter if you lived alone or had a family. Errands had to be done. In some cases, if I didn’t leave the office at 5, I wouldn’t have anything to eat (obviously I learned from that and it never happened again, but you get the point).

And if you’ve ever worked with Europeans, you’d know that when they take a vacation, they TAKE A VACATION. Usually two weeks straight. Americans sometimes wear it as a badge of honor to not take any leaves at all. And what do we do in the Philippines? Three-day vacations. We hunt for long weekends and stitch together four or five days, which is better. I still do that. I get it. And there have been years where I carried over ALL my vacation leaves because I just forgot to use them.

But as a seasoned 40-year-old, I would advise anyone: you have to sharpen the saw. You have to avoid burnout. Getting your mind off work actually produces better results. Your brain synapses refresh. You see things from a different point of view, you get new ideas. I mean, you restart your laptop and your phone every now and then. The right thing to do, the logical thing to do if you want efficiency and productivity, is to hard encode a reset. This makes sense in ALL machinery. All machinery needs maintenance. You need to reset things every now and then. Same for the brain; same for your heart (figuratively & I guess literally too).

As a principle, I tell all my teams that I will not text them after work hours, on weekends, or on holidays. I always say there will be exceptions, but I really keep them as exceptions. And what’s funny is, I lay out this rule, and most of my staff are happy. But there will always be people who text me after hours anyway. I tell them flat out to stop, or I don’t reply until it’s time to work again. Then I talk to them heart to heart. I try to understand why they were compelled to do it. Were they just trying to impress me? Are they so brainwashed by the system that they don’t want to take the free pass? Is there something deeper there that needs calibration? This isn’t natural for everyone, and I don’t know who to blame. So let’s just not blame anyone. Let’s focus on getting better.

So no, being first in and last out is not the badge we should be handing out. Do the work, do it well, then actually stop. Sharpen the saw. Take the whole two weeks. Your real life is happening in the hours you don’t give to the office, and those hours are not coming back.