22-05-2025
The corporate work week grows even longer
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Henry Ford's idea, implemented in 1926, was that shortening the work week to 40 hours would improve workers' well-being, boost their ability to spend and reduce turnover.
A century later those goals still hold value, but the 40-hour week is long gone, for the most part.
The average work week now weighs in at 46.6 hours, according to a new survey of more than 10,000 Microsoft Office users by Reclaim AI, a Dropbox-owned provider of workforce productivity tools.
The trend is hardly new, but it's deepening: In an earlier version of the survey published in October 2022, the average work week was 45.8 hours.
In the recent survey, only 30.9% of employees reported working 40 hours or fewer per week, and more than one in 10 said they worked more than 60 weekly hours.
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Unsurprisingly, executives logged the most weekly hours, averaging 50.2, although all other worker categories were in the mid-40s.
On a department-by-department basis, accounting and finance averaged 46.9 hours, the most other department than the C-suite, sales and administrative. Human resources put in the fewest hours.
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Reclaim AI had found in the earlier survey that the leading cause of burnout was a lack of time for focused work, much of it caused by incoming emails, chat messages, scheduled meetings and brief, informal team meetings.
'Regardless of your job title, everyone needs time to focus on heads-down work,' the company wrote in its new survey report. The average employee said they wanted 19.6 hours per week for such focus, but are getting only 10.6 hours of it.
Employees said that while they ideally want to attend 8.2 meetings per week, they actually attend 10.6 meetings. Executives and managers both attend about 30% more meetings than they consider to be optimally productive. Accounting and finance workers attend about 23% more meetings than they'd prefer.
'The biggest time loss most organizations face is unnecessary meetings that may be over-scheduled or lack a clear objective,' the report said.
Meetings that need to be rescheduled are particularly problematic, as 'last-minute cancellations create major time loss for attendees who invest time to ready their action items for discussion.' Surveyed executives said they reschedule or cancel 5.1 meetings per week, compared to the 11.5 meetings they actually attend.
Yet, the volume of meetings has been steeply declining in recent years, according to Reclaim AI's research. As recently as 2021, employees were attending an average of 25.6 meetings per week.
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