The rise of a toxic overtime culture is fundamentally reshaping the modern workplace. What began as a mechanism to ensure fair compensation for additional hours has gradually devolved into unpaid overtime in the workplace, especially for salaried employees. The original principle was simple: if someone works more, they should earn more. But that principle is being eroded across industries.
Overtime was once a safety net to protect workers from exploitation. It served as a boundary, a limit to how much an employer could demand without paying a premium. Today, that boundary has faded. For many companies, it is now routine to stretch 40-hour contracts into 50- or 60-hour workweeks, with no additional pay or acknowledgement. This is not framed as exploitation; it’s disguised as “dedication” or “team effort.”
Instead of hiring more staff to meet rising demand, businesses frequently shift that burden onto their existing workforce. These organizations report growth, celebrate margins, and award bonuses, all while normalizing unpaid labor as part of everyday operations.
This is not efficiency or resilience. It is a quiet, calculated abandonment of equity and sustainability. When overtime becomes all the time, what’s left behind is a workforce stretched thin and a culture built on denial.
"When overtime becomes all the time, something is broken."
The Evolution of Overtime: A Fair System Gone Wrong
To understand the current overtime culture, it is essential to revisit its origins. In the early 20th century, landmark legislation such as the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in the United States established key protections for workers. Among them were the 40-hour workweek and mandated overtime pay (typically 1.5x or 2x the regular wage) for hours worked beyond the standard. This framework was built to ensure that additional labor was not taken for granted but fairly compensated.
The intention was clear: guardrails were needed to prevent the kind of exploitation that had defined the industrial age. But over time, those guardrails weakened. Through legal exemptions, corporate strategy, and shifting cultural norms, the system began to tilt in favor of employers.
A key turning point was the rise of the “exempt” employee. Professionals and managers were increasingly categorized in ways that excluded them from overtime protections. While their roles carried more responsibility, they also came with a quiet expectation: work as long as it takes, without asking for more.
The 1980s ushered in hustle culture, where working late became not just accepted but celebrated. Overwork was reframed as ambition. Long hours became a status symbol. At the same time, always-on technology began to dissolve the boundaries between home and office. The workday no longer had a clear start or end.
Instead of addressing rising workloads through hiring, many companies embraced a different model: extract more labor from fewer employees. This shift gave birth to what we now recognize as unpaid overtime in the workplace. It has become routine for salaried workers to clock 60-hour weeks, not during crises but as part of business as usual.
This isn’t strategy. It’s a slow-moving failure hidden behind the illusion of productivity.
The Illusion of Efficiency: Why Overwork Is Bad Management
At the core of today’s overtime culture lies a persistent misconception: that more hours worked means more value created. It’s a belief often reinforced by outdated leadership models and superficial productivity metrics. Companies that uphold this mindset regularly celebrate long hours as signs of dedication while ignoring the real costs, which include burnout, disengagement, and diminished performance.
The Productivity Myth
A well-known study from Stanford University revealed that employee productivity declines sharply after 50 hours per week. Beyond that threshold, the value of the additional time drops significantly, while errors and inefficiencies rise. Working more does not necessarily mean accomplishing more. It simply drains energy reserves while offering diminishing returns.
Rather than addressing inefficiencies, investing in systems, or expanding headcount, many organizations choose the easiest path: ask the same people to work longer. This is often mistaken for efficiency when in fact, it’s a sign of reactive and short-sighted leadership.
The Hidden Costs of Burnout and Turnover
Prolonged unpaid overtime in the workplace is one of the primary drivers of burnout. The symptoms aren’t just personal struggles. They lead to measurable business impacts including absenteeism, increased health-related costs, and high turnover rates.
Replacing a skilled employee can cost up to 200% of their annual salary, yet these expenses are rarely tied back to the overwork that caused them. Instead, companies continue to stretch employees past their limits, without understanding the financial and cultural toll.
This is also where quiet quitting enters the equation. Employees stop overextending themselves and instead deliver only what they’re paid for. It’s not laziness. It’s a boundary.
Overwork weakens creativity, clouds judgment, and narrows focus. When businesses rely on overtime as a permanent fixture, they trade long-term innovation for short-term output. That is not a strategy. It is a management failure pretending to be discipline.
Why Companies Resist Hiring More People
When workloads regularly exceed what a 40-hour workweek can sustain, the rational response should be to increase staffing. Yet many organizations avoid this step. Instead, they lean into a model that relies on unpaid overtime in the workplace, expecting salaried employees to quietly absorb the excess. This isn’t a strategic decision based on long-term planning. It’s a convenient shortcut that trades sustainability for short-term financial optics.
Short-Term Thinking Prevails
For many companies, hiring is treated as an expense to be avoided, while the exploitation of existing staff is framed as a productivity win. The cost of onboarding, benefits, and salaries is seen as a direct hit to profit margins. By contrast, demanding more hours from salaried employees comes at no visible cost. The model may look efficient in quarterly reports, but it’s built on fragile ground. It fuels disengagement, burnout, and rising turnover—factors that erode long-term performance.
This mindset is especially common in environments where leadership incentives are tied to short-term metrics. When performance is judged by immediate gains, there is little reason to invest in workforce resilience or capacity.
Fear of Precedent
Admitting to overreliance on overtime culture comes with risk. Companies fear legal exposure, employee demands for retroactive compensation, and the reputational consequences of being labeled as exploitative. Rather than acknowledge the problem, many quietly institutionalize it.
The “Churn and Burn” Mentality
In highly competitive or economically strained job markets, some employers adopt a disposable view of labor. The belief is that if one person burns out, another will step in. Over time, this creates a toxic reputation that pushes away top talent. Companies save on headcount but lose the very asset that drives innovation and growth: people.
What Needs to Change: Fixing a Broken System
Addressing the harmful effects of overtime culture is not a matter of small adjustments. It demands a coordinated shift across organizational structures, leadership norms, legal frameworks, and employee behavior. Unpaid overtime in the workplace has become embedded in the way many companies operate, but it is not irreversible. The path to a healthier, more sustainable system starts with acknowledging that the current model is broken, while committing to rebuilding it from multiple angles.
Smarter Workforce Planning
Consistently exceeding a 40-hour workweek is not a reflection of dedication. It is a clear signal that a team’s workload exceeds its capacity. Businesses must stop treating overwork as a productivity metric and instead view it as a symptom of poor planning. Leaders need to audit workloads, forecast demand accurately, and hire based on real capacity needs. The goal is not to eliminate all pressure, but to design systems where overtime is the exception, not the structure.
Reinforced Legal Protections
Legislation must evolve to reflect modern working conditions. Many salaried employees fall through legal gaps, allowing unpaid overtime to become routine without consequence. Laws should clearly define protections, tighten enforcement, and incentivize sustainable staffing models. European “right to disconnect” laws offer a useful precedent. These measures show that regulation can support both worker well-being and company performance.
Employee Agency and Solidarity
Employees are not powerless. When workers document unpaid hours, set boundaries, and support each other in doing the same, they challenge normalization. Whether through unions, HR channels, or informal solidarity, employee action matters. The more people speak up, the harder it is for companies to pretend overwork is a choice.
A Cultural Shift in Leadership
Leaders must reject the idea that more hours equals more value. Effective leadership prioritizes sustainable systems, not short bursts of unsustainable output. Reward outcomes, not presence. A healthy, engaged workforce is a prerequisite for long-term success.
The problem with overtime culture today is not its existence, but its quiet entrenchment. What began as a way to fairly compensate extra effort has been co-opted into a systemic tool for unpaid overtime in the workplace, often disguised as dedication or company loyalty. This isn’t high performance. It is poor management masked as productivity, a model that prioritizes appearances over sustainability.
Organizations relying on unpaid labor to meet business goals are not running lean—they are running on exploitation. This approach leads directly to burnout, disengagement, and the rise of quiet quitting, where employees consciously step back to protect their time and health. It’s not rebellion. It’s self-preservation in a system that no longer respects boundaries.
The fix is straightforward: when the work exceeds capacity, hire more people. When performance drops due to exhaustion, change the structure, not the individuals. These are not radical ideas. They are the basics of ethical leadership and sustainable business.
Ultimately, this is about more than policy or profit. It is about values. If we want to see real change, we must speak up, share the truth, and demand a culture where work doesn’t come at the cost of well-being.
If overwork is hiding in your culture, it’s only a matter of time before it costs you.
Let’s talk about how better workforce design and strategic hiring can fix that, before burnout costs you your best people. Book a discovery call