Employees are working fewer hours and are more productive but still risk burnout

Employees now work fewer hours per day with greater efficiency, yielding a 40 percent jump in productivity, according to a new digital workplace report from ActivTrak Productivity Lab.

However, the findings also show that 34 percent of employees continue to be 'overutilized' at work, spending more than 75 percent of their time in this state. Only 62 percent of employees maintain a healthy balance of productivity to work hours, falling significantly short of the 80 percent goal the Productivity Lab recommends.

The report uses two years' worth of anonymized insights from 56,713 employees and 2.7 billion data points, collected across 177 companies via ActivTrak's workforce analytics platform, to look at workload balance and utilization levels; workplace focus and distractions; and work habits and schedule flexibility.

"As the data shows, many companies and employees have done exceedingly well to recalibrate workplace habits and expectations, and carve a better path to work-life balance. Unfortunately, many also continue to struggle with burnout, management challenges and resource constraints," says Gabriela Mauch, head of Productivity Lab. "Our goal at the Lab is to help organizations leverage people, processes and technology to address these obstacles, and achieve sustainable workplace productivity."

The findings show technology isn't always the answer to productivity though, and indeed can lead to more problems. For example, collaboration tools account for 21 percent of distractions, interrupting employees an average of 70 times per day. Employees spend 33 percent of their time on collaboration tools and multi-tasking activities throughout the day.

On a positive note the time spent in productive applications increased 40 percent from 4:37 hours to 6:28 hours, while the overall amount of time worked has decreased. In addition consistent work at weekends, defined as two plus hours/weekend for or more consecutive weeks, has decreased 11 percent.

The full report is available from the ActivTrak site.

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