When it comes to understanding the typical work schedule of a consultant, it's important to note that a 1-hour lunch break is not included. Research conducted by Consultancy, United Kingdom, shows that consultants usually work between 50 and 80 hours a week in order to meet the demands of their role. This is why smaller niche firms are succeeding, as a senior consultant from The Cambridge Group noted: “I feel very fortunate to have found TCG”. In the United Kingdom, it's essential to challenge the normalization of long consulting hours at all levels of the organization.
To be as efficient as possible and manage time-consuming work, consultants need to pay attention to certain points. To mitigate the detrimental effects of long consulting hours and lack of work-life balance, many companies have invested heavily in policies. For example, shorter projects are common for strategy consultants and create particularly intense work periods. In the Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden and Norway), both clients and consultants place more emphasis on a lifestyle-focused project culture. As a consultant, it's up to you to identify your own needs, set limits, respect them and communicate them effectively.
According to Dalton, more and more job seekers are discovering the benefits of joining these niche consulting firms. In the notoriously extreme work environment of strategic consulting, this figure rises to 100 percent with an average of 20 overtime consulting hours. In the big four companies, 88% of people work overtime with an average of 10.3 overtime consulting hours. However, it's important to remember that a bad lifestyle as a consultant may be triggered by your own ambitions and insecurities. The Human Resources department may try to reinforce and improve work-life balance, but managers undermine it due to unrealistic expectations about workload and availability. In intensive strategic consulting firms, health and well-being of employees is usually monitored weekly while this is less common in other consulting firms.
In Germany, long working hours are due to clients who know exactly how much to demand in order to maximize the potential benefit of their collaboration. As a result, consulting firms have people who are more willing and able to accept compromises between work and personal life. This can lead to lower professional effectiveness, greater voluntary employee turnover and the cost of replacing staff (and potential customers) when a consultant leaves the company. It's important for consultants to identify their own needs, set limits and communicate them effectively in order to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
