Linked – Why a 5-day workweek is a waste of time and money for big companies
I think the key word in this quote is uninterrupted.
“Employees don’t need the five-day workweek, according to a Monday report from the Workforce Institute at Kronos and Future Workplace. Nearly half (45%) of full-time workers said it takes less than five hours a day to do their job if they work uninterrupted, while 72% said they could work four days or less per week if their pay remained constant.”
I suspect this is true for many people. We waste a lot of our time at work doing things that are not “the work”. Meetings, unnecessary email chains, distractions, etc. waste a ton of time during each day. If you add up the amount of actual time spent doing the work we are responsible for, you could probably cut 20% of your time spent in the office without any noticeable drop in productivity.
Alas that world where we eliminate all the clutter of the workplace and focus on our work might as well be fantasy land. The truth, which the article below points out, is that even while admitting we only really do “the work” for 5 hours per day, we also work longer hours and more overtime than ever.
That’s a sign that rather than having more work than employees can get done in a day, we have a scheduling and planning issue. As in, I’m going to ask you to meet a deadline that has no basis in the actual work schedule, just because. (i.e. demanding “I need this done today” at 4:00PM) And the reason why the request comes in so late is usually because the person making it was tied up in meetings until then, and they need it done today so they can move it to the next stage early tomorrow before they get bogged down in meetings again.. It’s a never ending cycle.
Frankly, the workplace is broken. We just haven’t figured out how to replace it yet.
