Does it pay to be a selfless worker?

Wouldn’t we all want a colleague, or employee, who is selfless, takes on extra work and is willing to help, or assist, on projects that don’t have relevance to their own day-to-day workload?

It seems a no brainer yet, new research from the Harvard Business Review (HBR) has found that over 60% of managers, engineers and salespeople at Fortune 500 companies would like to spend less time in ‘response mode’ – helping with ad-hoc requests from colleagues.

The same research concludes that 75% to 90% of all workday helping is reactive – someone makes a request, and someone else drops their workload to respond – which can lead to burnout.

A separate HBR study found if selfless employees responded to co-worker requests with increased frequency, they were more likely to have their energy depleted – making focus on their own work increasingly difficult, with ‘hangover’ effects lasting until the day after.