It seems that working time doesnt matter much to research workers who are evaluated by merit. I use to work all the time because, (un)fortunately, I did not have much else to do. Nevertheless the funding body for my PhD course had a policy on the condition of work, such as how many days off a year a funded student can take. I only used them when I was going back to Japan for two-weeks or so and when I was attending conferences.
Now I am in a position of setting up a policy for those who are going to work in my lab, since many of the funding bodies who support my students/postdocs don’t necessarily have detailed terms on how they should work. I want the policy to be transparent and fair for me and them, so I decided to set explicit working hours for them. In Japan I have heard someone saying that lab members should come to work before their supervisor and go home after him/her. OK then, let’s say they should work from 8AM to 9PM, seven day a week, namely 91 hours a week.
However, is it fair to set such working hours? Or is it even legal? In UK legal working time is 48 hours, and there is a loop hole. The working hours do not include unpaid overtime where you volunteer to do so, for example, staying late to finish something off. (see http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHoursAndTimeOff/DG_10029426). In other words, I can keep my lab members longer at work if I give them plenty of things to do and they “volunteer” to continue them after working hours. As for paid annual leave, all workers will have 4.8 weeks (24 days) per year from October. The caveat is that I can set when they should take holidays, so it is possible to set holidays when they are very busy, so that they would come to work anyway even during holiday in order to continue their experiments.
Of course I am not being serious, but this illustrates how vulnerable the lab workers can be even within the limit of law and I am aware that not all PIs are law-abiding when it comes to working time. In my personal view, research should be self-motivated and there is little point in setting working time, though I will probably use the 48 hours limit as guidance when I decide on how much tasks I allocate to lab members each week. Is this fair or not? I would appreciate your opinions.
I disagree on the idea of the employee coming earlier and leaving later. Official work hours should be the same for everyone, but in practice a good boss should (appear) to work more then everybody else!…
I like to think that, in the EU, if a researcher filed a grievance against the employer who was coercing employees into working 91 (or even 41) hours a week, even a mediocre lawyer would have no problem winning the case. The issue then becomes the same as that faced by many people who sue their employers, no matter how legitimately: how likely will you be to get a job afterwards?
As I’ve mentioned in one of my posts, the amount of time a scientist is present in the building often bears little correlation to ultimate output. A well-rested team-member with a happy life outside of the lab may actually perform a lot better than the sad emaciated specter of a post-doc who never leaves it.
And then there is the issue of trust and respect. Do you trust your team to work well, or don’t you? Do you accept that, over the years, grown-up researchers tend to figure out the rhythms and cadences that work best for themselves, or do you cling to the rather deluded viewpoint that you know best?
Perhaps it depends on the work that needs to be done. A friend did his PhD in theoretical physics and found that he was not able to maintain more than 5 hours a day of concentrated mental activity. I think that this is true for most people (especially me!).
On the other hand, with the long incubations/reaction times for some experiments, it is sometimes reasonable to expect a researcher to commit to being available for ‘20 hour days’ on occassion in order to get meaningful results (though perhaps it might be better to make friends and work in shifts). :)
Looking back though, I think that it would have helped me to have been encouraged to plan my day such that that the tasks could be completed within the 8-hour-work-day as far as possible.
There is an interesting related discussion in Jenny Rohn’s blog.
:) Hi Jenny. It took me so long to write my post that you had finished yours in the meantime. My excuse was that I was multitasking – the other task was playing a game of online scrabble!
Excellent, Bronwen, I approve.
Yes, you can argue that popping in for five minutes on a Sunday to inoculate an overnight culture can save 24 hours in experimental time. And that’s fine if you want to pop in on a Sunday. Personally, I don’t, and have come up with a number of interesting ways to get around this (including ‘task swapping’ with weekenders who hate early morning timepoints, for example). If this works for me, a lab head shouldn’t quibble.
Hi Kojiro, 91 hour weeks might just encourage the mass exodus of students and postdocs from academic research! I find that I am much more productive if my PI allows me the freedom to come in and leave whenever I want. I have also worked for a PI who expected everyone to be at work by 9 am everyday regardless of what they need to do (otherwise he would send out a passive aggressive email to the lab). He would also make members of the lab feel guilty for taking time off. The result is actually less productivity and a lot of aimless shuffling around. I think overall creativity in the lab will suffer if the PI is inflexible.
I’m fresh out of undergrad, working on a post-bac in biochemistry, and my PI’s attitude towards time worked is basically the following: if your work gets done, he doesn’t care. Funny enough, because he’s been so lenient on the issue, I tend to police myself- I have never missed a deadline (which are weekly, every Monday morning)and I routinely turn in more working data weekly than was requested. Still, I take advantage of the freedom, rarely showing up before noon, and often working through the night to finish projects with long incubation times. (Three-hour incubation time for your primary antibody? Pop in a movie.) Still, his kindness and generosity (his workers are the only techs in the department to receive benefits,if you’ve “done the work”, he gives you primary authorship, and he’s just a dog-gone nice guy) has me happily, and continuously, working 20+ hours of overtime every week. I don’t think I’ve ever not worked a weekend.
I know, I sound like I’ve been duped, but there’s something to be learned here; I’m happy, the authorship rights make me feel acknowledged and appreciated, and the man always gets his data. In the end, it’s really a Machiavellian conundrum- as a dictator, is it better to be feared, or to be loved?