Employees are choosing to spread out their working days to accommodate more flexibility.
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The days of working 9-to-5 are being replaced by new working patterns that see employees not only working more when they’re out of the office but also spending more time at their desks too.
Just as workers underestimated the amount of flexibility employers are willing to give in terms of start times, employers are also underestimating the amount of time that workers spend completing tasks in their own time. Further evidence that flexible working is growing faster than anyone appreciates.
As a whole, employers thought that their employees were putting in an average of 55 minute a day working away from the office. In reality, employees had clocked up a mean of 46 minutes of extra work before they had even reached their desks in the morning.
In addition to logging on early, employees are also logging off late, with the average employee not stopping work fully until 7:19 p.m. Workers in all the countries surveyed spent between nine and ten hours in the office and 11 and 12 hours checking mail, but there are regional differences over when and where those hours are put in.
Brits start and stop the earliest (7:17 a.m. for the first email check and an office departure at 5:32 p.m.) while the Irish start and stop the latest (8:39 a.m. office arrival, 8:02 p.m. for the last email check). But the Americans are online the longest – 11 hours and 56 minutes.
Overall, the global results show that the average person starts checking their work email at 7:42 a.m., gets into the office at 8:18 a.m., leaves the office at 5:48 p.m. and stops working fully at 7:19 p.m.
Next: Personal Tasks