When Is It Right to Work Late?

In short: Working late can signal commitment, or a capability gap somewhere else - in the team or with the client - and the person staying back might be the one least responsible for it. Glenn Donaldson argues leaders should find out why, and that working late is right when it’s the exception and everyone involved knows why.

I recently attended a panel discussion, mostly involving people from small agencies, where the topic of working late came up. It was insightful and at times worrying. The question, “when is it right to work late?”, sounds as if it should have a yes or no answer. In my view, it doesn’t. Underneath it sits a harder question.

How can you tell why someone is working late?

Is it a capability issue? Is someone’s work ethic, and their sense of duty to the team, covering for a capability gap elsewhere in it? Or is it capacity - more work than there are people or hours to do it? In a small business, work tends to come in peaks and troughs, and a pitch can turn an ordinary week into a very long one. Sometimes it’s the person. Most of us have worked with someone who has to do it all - the crisis junkie, or the agile maverick who seems to thrive on the late finish.

A lot of the conversation about working late was about good people. Some work too hard or are stressed by things that get easier with experience, and some of the pressure comes from the leaders and senior people in a business, often without them realising it. Shamefully, on a few occasions, I have been the leader passing my stress on to others.

The marketing and related industries know this issue well, so when I decided to write this, I searched for evidence of the problem. A 2022 Mentally Healthy survey of about 1,400 people in Australian media, marketing and creative jobs found fewer than half (47%) said they had enough time to do their work. Long hours and unrealistic expectations were among the top five stressors. The same survey found symptoms of depression and anxiety had fallen since 2020, so things are moving in the right direction, but there has been a lot of change in the few years since this survey was conducted and it would be fascinating to run the survey again.

There was rarely one answer to “when is it right to work late?”. The most useful thing I heard answered a different question - how to stop it doing harm. An agency leader put it simply. Whatever the cause, it’s leadership’s responsibility. I love this, and to me it applies to a functional leader as well as a business’s leader. They should make it their job to know that someone is capable of the role they’ve been given, that their workload is reasonable, and to have a real sense of how their people are tracking mentally and functionally.

That last part may have a little or a lot to do with work, but if the work is contributing, a good leader should at least be aware of it, and keep an eye on it. I would hope a leader is in the role because they have functional IQ, and more importantly in this regard, good EQ.

The underlying issue is that leaders are often stretched too. In Gallup’s latest global workplace study, 42% of managers said they feel stress a lot of the time, and Gallup puts around 70% of a team’s engagement down to its manager. So the people best placed to notice someone working late are often stretched themselves.

Think about the junior staff member. They may not yet have the experience to handle the complex problems that someone further along in their career can work through quickly. Sometimes, their ambition may run ahead of their capability.

One business owner told the story of a junior staff member who was burning out. They were working long hours, and there was no awareness of the issue. This staff member was clearly struggling with the role. Was it a work ethic gone haywire? Was it a burning desire to get ahead in their career - to get the acknowledgement and the coveted job title? Perhaps more simply, without the experience to know otherwise, did the staff member know when the job was ‘finished’? It’s hard to know.

Thankfully, and to their credit, the leader took responsibility and stepped in to look after the person behind the long hours. That care made a real difference to someone’s life.

The numbers suggest this issue isn’t unusual. Australians aged 18 to 24 do the most unpaid overtime of anyone - 4.7 hours a week, almost an hour of unpaid work for every five paid hours, according to the Centre for Future Work’s 2025 survey. In Deloitte’s 2025 survey of Gen Z and millennial workers, four in ten Gen Zs said they feel stressed or anxious all or most of the time, and not having enough time to finish their work was one of the main reasons.

It’s worth saying how much has changed, too. COVID shifted how many of us think about work - where we do it, and when we stop. Working from home has also made late work harder to see. A leader can’t look across the office at 7pm and notice who’s still there, and an email scheduled to arrive at 9am can hide the fact it was written at 11 the night before. Working from home is often thought of as doing less. For some people, the hard part is stopping.

For a lot of younger people it’s a better world, and I think their attitude to work and its place in their life is great. Good on them. Some (of us) older and more experienced people might find this sentiment frustrating, and can sound like their parents once did - “it was different when we were young”. I understand that, but the ground has moved under all of us. Whatever we feel about that, it’s an ethical change and now a legal one, and that’s the ground leaders work on.

Workload is now recognised as a workplace hazard. “High job demands” sit in Safe Work Australia’s code on psychosocial hazards, and employers have a duty to manage them. Since 2024, employees have also had a legal right to ignore unreasonable contact out of hours, and that right reached small businesses in August 2025.

There is something else that I had not considered until recently. An episode of Simon Sinek’s podcast A Bit of Optimism, “The Hidden Cost of Always Saying Yes”, got me thinking. Simon and his co-host, Yale professor and LifeShop founder Alex Simon, talked about why capable people take on more than they can realistically handle. They discussed the burnout that this can cause, and the light bulb moment for me was that it can also be exacerbated by the emotional load a person is carrying for other people. Looking back at my own experience, I never saw the emotional load I carried for staff, and from my life outside of work, as contributing to my work-related stress. In hindsight, it’s clear it was.

What the panel discussion made me think of most was how often this can be a sign that someone else has dropped the ball. This has been a personal frustration. It’s not OK, and the person staying back might be the one least responsible for it. Which brings me back to the question I started with - how can you tell why someone is working late? Looking at capability and workload across the whole team can show who is dropping the ball, and importantly, why.

The intriguing part is that sometimes the capability gap sits with the client!

What do you do when the capability problem sits with a client who is critical to your success - one you may have built your structure, finances and your reputation around? It’s hard to push back on a client the business depends on.

That raises a question I’ll come back to. Why would a creative or media agency take on a client without doing some due diligence of its own first? Agencies are assessed closely by the businesses that hire them. It’s much rarer for an agency to look closely at whether a client is set up to be a good one.

If I had to answer the question myself, working late is right when it’s the exception, and everyone involved knows why.

I’d also put a simpler question to any leader. When did you last look at who is working late in your business, and ask why?