Hopelessly devoted

In an interview and book extract, researcher Malissa Clark explains that workaholism is about more than being last out of the office. And she should know.

- NIKI BEZZANT

Workaholism researcher and psychologist Malissa Clark and I are laughing at the irony of the work it's taken to get us to this interview. The assignment came at short notice - I've spent a chunk of the weekend tracking down publicists, reading Clark's book and, in a multi-email exchange with the author, organising our Zoom call across the world's time zones. It is my morning, her evening.

"I felt like such a hypocrite," she says, reflecting on our weekend of asynchronous communications. The irony had struck me, too, although not until I'd fired off several emails to get the process started.

It's a minor example of what Clark explores in her book, Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture is Bad for Business - and How to Fix It. In it, and in her research work at the University of Georgia, where she is associate head of the psychology department and director of the Healthy Work Lab, Clark examines how being constantly connected to work - physically, electronically and psychologically - has become the norm for so many people, and how it affects us.

Clark is no stranger to workaholism. She describes taking just a week off after the birth of her daughter. Before the birth, she was remote-working in a coffee shop right up until she was forced to head to the hospital, having timed her contractions as she sat typing. As the contractions became more and more painful, she recalls, "it didn't even cross my mind to email my professor and ask: 'Can I have an extension on this exam?""

Clark is now keen to bust a number of myths that have grown up around the stereotypical idea of the workaholic. Most of us, she says - whether workers or leaders have an erroneous sense of what workaholism is. Often, we think it's directly correlated with how much we work. And we tend to think that's a good thing.