What companies lose when they glorify overworking?

Companies that glorify overworking often believe they are rewarding commitment and grit. Leaders talk about the person who stayed online the latest, the manager who answered messages past midnight, or the team that pulled several sleepless nights to make a launch happen. On the surface, these stories sound like dedication. Underneath, they create a culture where exhaustion becomes normal, problems are hidden under effort, and real performance is quietly eroded.

Inside these companies, people feel the pressure long before anyone names it. They plan their evenings around the possibility of late pings. They silence family chats during supposed off hours. They feel guilty for logging off at a reasonable time, even when their work is done. Nobody needs a poster that claims “work is family.” The culture speaks through rewards and signals. Those who always say yes are praised. Those who set boundaries are treated as less committed. That is where the organisation starts to pay a price it does not immediately see.

One of the first losses is structural clarity. In younger or high growth companies, there will always be intense seasons. There are launches, big customers, fundraising rounds, and short runways that require short bursts of extra effort. The problem starts when heroics are no longer the exception but the standard operating procedure. When deadlines are repeatedly met only because a few people push themselves past healthy limits, leaders can misread the situation. They start to believe the system works, when in fact it only works because certain individuals are constantly compensating for its weaknesses.

Overwork becomes a convenient bandage for deeper issues. If a founder always jumps in when a deal is at risk, the team learns that escalation will trigger a last minute rescue instead of a review of upstream sales processes. If product managers and engineers routinely stay late to fix misaligned requirements, leadership may conclude that aggressive timelines are simply part of the company DNA, rather than a sign that scoping and prioritisation are broken. Instead of asking which roles are under scoped, which decisions are delayed, and which processes are too fragile to scale, the company keeps leaning on the same group of people. It looks resilient from the outside, but the resilience is borrowed from human stamina, not built into systems.

The next loss often shows up in a subtle place: judgment. Many leaders only take overwork seriously when they see visible burnout, such as medical leave, emotional breakdowns, or sudden resignations. By the time those appear, the damage has been accumulating for a long time. Tired teams can still ship features, attend standups, and respond to emails. Output on paper may look acceptable. What changes first is the quality of thinking that underpins that output.

Exhausted people are less able to hold nuance or consider trade offs. They miss risks they would normally catch. They default to familiar solutions instead of exploring better approaches. A sales leader who has not had a true day off in weeks is more likely to reach for the same discount or concession, even if it is not ideal. A tech lead who is constantly context switching into late nights is more likely to patch rather than redesign a fragile piece of infrastructure. None of this is about personal weakness. It is a predictable outcome of cognitive overload. The metrics that leaders watch rarely tell this story explicitly. Instead, they see more rework, more urgent defects, more last minute escalations that a rested team could have prevented.

Trust is another casualty when overwork becomes the standard. Employees usually understand that ambitious companies require effort. What hurts them is not hard work itself but the sense that their effort is being taken for granted. When leaders publicly praise the person who replies to messages at midnight, everyone else hears an unspoken instruction: if you want to be seen as committed, you must do the same. When performance reviews quietly value visible busyness over sustainable impact, people learn that it is risky to say no. Over time, they become less honest about their capacity. They underreport stress, inflate what they can take on, and hide the compromises they make in order to cope.

In practical terms, psychological safety shrinks. Team members become hesitant to flag unrealistic timelines or to admit when they are at their limit, because they fear it will be interpreted as lack of drive. They may see colleagues struggling, but they stay silent because speaking up could mean inheriting more work themselves. Leaders may say, “You can always talk to me,” but if their reactions to boundaries include visible disappointment, subtle exclusion, or reduced opportunities, people will believe the behavior, not the words. Trust does not vanish in a single dramatic moment. It leaks away through hundreds of minor experiences in which the organisation chooses output over honesty.

Over time, the way promotions and leadership appointments are made also begins to shift. In a culture that idolizes overwork, the people who rise are often those who appear endlessly available, who can tolerate multiple crises, and who rarely show strain. This seems like a reasonable filter at first. In early stages, the ability to stand in the fire is valuable. But if this becomes the main criterion for advancement, the company screens out a different profile of leader: the ones who insist on better processes, who push for clarity of scope, who are willing to say, “This operating model will break us within a year if we do not fix it.” These individuals can be misread as less loyal or less hungry, when in fact they are thinking like the leaders you will need later.

This selection effect has long term consequences. People with strong leadership potential, particularly those with caregiving responsibilities or a healthier sense of boundaries, quietly leave. They seek environments where they can do challenging work without sacrificing their health or relationships every quarter. What remains is a narrower leadership pipeline filled with people who have very high tolerance for chaos and self sacrifice, but less experience in building systems that make everyone else more effective. You end up with excellent firefighters and too few designers of fire prevention.

The way value is perceived inside the company is also distorted. When long hours are normal, visible presence starts to stand in for actual contribution. In distributed or hybrid teams, this is especially risky. Managers repeatedly see certain names online late at night and unconsciously tag them as reliable and dedicated. Those who deliberately structure their workday, protect deep work, or operate in different time zones may produce equal or higher impact, but they get less credit because they do not fit the heroic image. This biases performance reviews and shapes who is invited into high visibility projects or stretch roles. The same individuals are pulled into more responsibilities, which often means even more unpaid overtime. Meanwhile, equally capable but less visibly overworked colleagues are overlooked.

There is also an external signal that companies send when they glorify overworking. The talent market listens. Prospective hires read reviews on employer platforms, talk to former employees, and watch how leaders talk about work on social media. When they see repeated stories of late nights and constant hustle presented as inspiration, experienced operators draw conclusions about planning discipline, boundary setting, and the maturity of the leadership team. They suspect that growth is being driven not by thoughtful scaling but by pushing people harder. This does not discourage everyone, but it significantly reduces your ability to attract seasoned managers and senior individual contributors who know what sustainable execution looks like. It also increases the chance that your strongest people will walk away just as they become most valuable, because they cannot see a realistic future in which they can both grow and stay healthy.

Shifting away from this trap does not require eliminating every period of intense work. Ambitious teams will always face crunch moments. The key difference is how the organisation interprets those moments. A healthy culture treats sustained overwork as data. It asks why a particular team is repeatedly stretched beyond capacity. It examines whether headcount is aligned with scope, whether decision makers are accessible early enough, and whether external promises are being made without internal consultation. It encourages managers to ask, “What would need to change for us to hit this target within normal working hours?” It also normalises honest conversations where employees can say, “I can maintain this level of intensity for a short period, but not indefinitely,” without fearing that their reputation will suffer.

For founders and senior leaders, the most powerful signal comes from their own habits. If they send non urgent messages late at night and consistently expect quick responses, the organisation learns that availability matters more than boundaries. If they talk proudly about their own sleepless nights as proof of commitment, others will feel pressure to mirror them. On the other hand, if they deliberately delay non urgent communication to working hours, openly rescope work when teams raise red flags, and frame their role as designing a system that does not need constant heroics, the story begins to change.

Ultimately, glorifying overwork is not just a question of kindness or work life balance. It is a question of design, risk, and long term performance. You can extract additional hours and effort from people in the short term, but you pay for it through weaker judgment, eroded trust, and a narrowed leadership pipeline. The uncomfortable but necessary question for any leader is this: if you stopped praising overwork as a virtue, what fragilities in your systems, planning, and personal habits would be exposed? Confronting that question directly often reveals that the real cost of maintaining the current culture is far higher than the short term comfort it provides.

Thinking