Malissa Clark on Workaholism and Never Not Working

Ben Baran (0:01)

Take a moment to think about the following questions. Do you feel compelled to work? Is your work difficult to stop thinking about? Are you upset if you have to miss a day of work?

Do you tend to work beyond the actual requirements of your job? If so, you might be a workaholic, and so are almost half of US workers. Our guest today is Malissa Clark, author of Never Not Working, Why the Always On Culture Is Bad for Business and How to Fix It.

Malissa is an associate professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Georgia, where she has been on the faculty since 2013 And she joined us for a deep conversation all about workaholism, what it is, why it matters, and what we can do about it. If you care at all about your work and your life, this is simply an episode you can't miss. Stay tuned for our conversation with Malissa Clark. Welcome to The Indigo Podcast, an exploration of human flourishing at work and beyond. I'm Ben Barron of Indigo Anchor and Cleveland State University.

Chris Everett (1:05)

And I'm Chris Everett of Indigo Anchor. For more information, please visit us at www.indigopodcast.com.

Ben Baran (1:18)

Malissa Clark, welcome to The Indigo Podcast.

Malissa Clark (1:22)

Thank you for having me.

Ben Baran (1:24)

We are super excited to talk with you today, and we're going to be talking about workaholism, and most specifically, going to be talking about your book, Never Not Working. So we're so excited to delve into those conversations. We've been up all night, just obsessing about reading the book and making sure that we were overprepared for this interview. Sounds like this is the perfect book for you, though.

Chris Everett (1:51)

I even leaned in to extra reading for this episode.

Ben Baran (1:59)

So we're going to kind of walk through a handful of different topics related to the book, and I think maybe where we can start is just the workaholism landscape, so to speak.

And what is the... Let's do a little problem identification. What's going on out there in the world of work that you really cared enough about to research both in a scholarly context and in this popular press book?

Malissa Clark (2:24)

Yeah, well, it sounds like you might relate to, you know, something that I've struggled with my whole life, really, feeling like I needed to always be on, always be doing something, going, going, going, going from a young age, really, and didn't really realize there was a term to describe this feeling that I, you know, always kind of had towards overachieving and going above and beyond. And so, yeah, I found out there's a term called workaholism that kind of put all the pieces together, and it was my aha moment.

And I realized, wow, I think I'm a workaholic. And so I set out to understand it from a scientific perspective.

Ben Baran (3:10)

So as they say, sometimes our research is really me search, right?

Malissa Clark (3:14)

Yes, absolutely. That's actually what I call it. I call it me search, trying to understand myself better.

Ben Baran (3:19)

Nothing wrong with that, for sure.

Chris Everett (3:22)

Isn't that the perennial joke about, now you guys are IO psych people, industrial and organizational psychologists, but maybe it's the same thing. You know, people go into psychology to help others or to help themselves.

And I think that's great.

Malissa Clark (3:36)

It's only natural, right? We're curious. We want to understand, you know, the way we are and the dynamics around us. So, yeah.

Chris Everett (3:44)

One of the things that I think that's kind of, it's always in the zeitgeist, is like, the man really stinks.

I'm a worker. You don't understand me. I'm the victim here. But I really loved how you kicked off this book, because you kicked off with some inconvenient truths, as it were, that we, the average worker is working fewer hours than ever before. And you know what? Back in the day, there wasn't a retire, children were your retirement plan.

Malissa Clark (4:16)

Right.

Chris Everett (4:16)

Right?

So, what's the problem here? In the work, how can you have workaholism?

Malissa Clark (4:22)

I feel like they work longer, right? So, it was all these contradictions that I just, like you said, I threw that at the beginning to really confuse people. But it's actually true when you look at the data.

We are working less than ever before. However, because we're so tethered to work now, particularly with our smartphones and technology, it really, there's, it's difficult to quantify our work because we're actually always on, if you think about it.