You don’t rate these days unless you claim to be busy

By Jena McGregor

The Washington Post

It’s a hyper-busy time of the year. Holiday shopping, hosting and travel preparations. Year-end financial moves. A mountain of work to finish before using up any final vacation days. For once, the gripe, “I’m just so busy,” feels legitimate.

But most of the year, it has taken on the feel of an overused humblebrag, a showy effort to tout one’s value and desirability at work. In information-drenched, 24/7 work workplaces, where leisure has become even scarcer for many professionals than money or luxury goods, being “so busy” seems to be a badge of honor, a status symbol.

Now researchers from Columbia, Georgetown and Harvard universities say that’s exactly what it is, with “busyness” replacing conspicuous consumption as a public marker for our worth. In a Harvard Business Review article, the trio argue that “busyness” is a way people signal their importance — and that marketers are responding to it.

In experiments, they found participants thought of people who were described as working longer hours as having higher status. They also tended to put brands or products that offer convenience on a level with those known for being expensive.

“Luxury goods are losing signaling value,” said Silvia Bellezza, a professor of marketing at Columbia University who co-authored the paper. Talking about a scarcity of time is “a more nuanced way to display [status] that doesn’t go through conspicuous consumption. It’s implicitly telling you that ‘I am very important, and my human capital is sought after, which is why I’m so busy.’ “

In a series of experiments, Bellezza and her colleagues asked respondents to rate the social status of a person described as working long hours at work versus one who has a more leisurely lifestyle. Again and again, participants rated the person who worked more as having more social status, even when the hypothetical subject was thought to work slowly.

In other words, getting the work done fast and having more time for leisure was not associated with prestige. This tendency is something that likely influences how many managers see their people, Bellezza says. Managers should “shift as much as possible their attention to what people are producing, rather than how long they’re in the office.”

The study also found that brands associated with helping people deal with their busyness can also take on status.

They compared what 400 respondents thought about a middle-aged consumer who shopped at an online grocery service like Peapod, the high-end store Whole Foods, or a middle-of-the-road store like Trader Joe’s. Both Whole Foods and Peapod were seen as having more status than Trader Joe’s, but were on par with each other in how consumers viewed them.

“Shopping online conveys that the person doesn’t have time to shop, and that operates as a signal of status,” Bellezza said. Likewise, in another experiment, people wearing a Bluetooth headset, which acts as a display of professional multi-tasking, switching between talking and listening to music, were seen as higher status than those wearing traditional headphones, which are more associated with leisure time.

Some brands have already tried to use that dynamic in their advertising.She points to a Cadillac ad from 2014 starring actor Neal McDonough that touted American achievement and hard work, even finishing with “as for all the stuff, that’s the upside of only taking two weeks off in August.”

She believes we’re likely to see even more ads “implicitly telling people they’re important because their time is scarce.”

Bellezza also did a comparative study in the paper of how American subjects versus those in Italy perceived busyness at work. Unsurprisingly, they saw the reverse among Italian respondents, with busyness at work being less of a status symbol, similar to the way it was a century ago, when leisure time was the mark of the good life.

Of course, the more people brag about how busy they are, the more common it becomes, and as that happens, particularly in workaholic cultures, status symbols, just like fashions, are likely to change, Bellezza says. “It becomes mainstream,” Bellezza says. “For signals of status to operate, they need to be visible and they need to be costly. And visibility is compromised if everyone else is doing it too.”

— The Washington Post