With extra office tasks, they’ve got too much work to do
Although three-quarters of full-time employees say they technically have enough time to complete their main responsibilities during the workday, more than a third (37 percent) are working overtime — and most of the extra hours are spent on duties that don’t directly relate to employees’ jobs, according to a new global survey.
Some of the most frequent reasons employees say they’re wasting time at work include fixing a problem someone else caused (22 percent); attending meetings (12 percent) and handling email (11 percent).
Regionally, Australia and the U.K. contain the largest percentage of employees who feel they have too much work to do to finish it during the day. More employees in the U.S., however, are working overtime, with 49 percent working more than 40 hours a week — followed by India, Mexico and Germany.
The push to log in long hours isn’t solely coming from employees’ managers. Of the 53 percent of workers worldwide who say they feel a need to be working more than 40 hours a week to further their career, more than half (60 percent) say they pressure themselves into working overtime.
The additional hours don’t always equate to greater returns, though. Forty-one percent of employees say part of the reason they have too much work to do is because they lose an hour or more a day on administrative tasks that don’t produce value for their organization.