Do Minnesotans Feel Like Their Workdays Never End?

For some people, when their shift at work is over, they hop in their car and don’t focus on work again until it’s time for them to punch in the next time. 

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But for others, work is always swirling around. Whether it’s getting emails or calls, the workday tends to bleed into our free time quite often. A 2019 Gallup Poll said that 52% of American workers tallied more than 40 hours per week in their jobs.  

Those numbers could have fluctuated some since the pandemic.  

I bring this up because I came across an article yesterday in my daily email from “Morning Brew” titled “Employees are imprisoned in an infinite workday”. 

The definition of “infinite” of course is endless or limitless, and if you are doing a lot of work from home but you don’t work from home, it can feel like your workdays never end. 

The article cites Microsoft using the term “infinite workday” during the pandemic when so many people shifted to work from home to keep their jobs and their companies viable. 

Microsoft released a study that uses what they’re calling trillions of datapoints they collected from their Microsoft 365 software, which a good number of companies have for their employees to use. (I’m writing this right now on a Microsoft 365 product). 

This allowed the software company to see when people were logging on to work and how long they were active. 

The article from Morning Brew says that 40% of people were online in work mode as early as 6am and by 8am the Microsoft Product “Teams” was the primary means of communication for a lot of companies.  

The two most popular times for meetings are between 9 and 11am and 1 and 3pm. 57% of the employee's using “Teams” were finding themselves in a meeting that had not been prearranged with an “invitation” to join the meeting sent prior to the meeting time.  

There were a couple of other concerning points that came from the study from Microsoft. The first was that the number of meetings that took place on “Teams” after 8pm rose over 16%. If your company has offices out of the country, this might be more explainable and accepted, but if not, well? 

The second concerning point was that the average American worker had their focus and productivity interrupted (their word, not mine) every two minutes by an email, meeting invite, or some kind of notification during the core business hours.  

On top of that, this study found that the average worker sends 50 emails outside of normal workday hours. And on the weekends 20% of us check our email before noon each day.  

One more thing that this study pointed out that there are some people out there saying that using AI can help with the workload workers are facing, but they found that most often using AI for certain projects only made it possible for human employees to be given more assignments that cause the work-life balance to be as out of whack as it was before AI was brought in.  

Does this above facts sound like the pattern you’ve been living in lately?