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The average workday increased during the pandemic’s early weeks (2020)

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113 points robtherobber | 3 comments | 16 May 25 09:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.677s | source
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kleiba ◴[16 May 25 12:04 UTC] No.44004395[source]▶
> An analysis of the emails and meetings of 3.1 million people in 16 global cities found that the average workday increased by 8.2 percent—or 48.5 minutes—during the pandemic’s early weeks.

For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.

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1. trollbridge ◴[16 May 25 12:10 UTC] No.44004452[source]▶
I’m planning to have someone from Australia do some work and was computing the amount paid per hour etc and the numbers didn’t add up. “This is too small.” Then I got a reminder their workweek is 38 hours (basically 8 hour shifts with unpaid 24 minutes’ of breaks). In America we tend to have 8.5 or 9 hour shifts with 30-50 minutes of lunch break.

Now with RTO, employers want the same productivity they had with WFH (basically more people on call, available outside of regular hours, and a standard workday almost an hour longer).

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2. kleiba ◴[16 May 25 12:15 UTC] No.44004491[source]▶
For a lot of tasks, productivity does not scale linearly with the amount of hours worked. When your shift is an hour longer, that doesn't necessarily mean that you get an hour more work done.
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3. mattkrause ◴[16 May 25 13:25 UTC] No.44005241[source]▶
Almost no tasks!

There’s some fascinating data from factories producing munitions during WWII (a highly motivated workforce doing skilled work) showing that total productivity plateaus at about 45 hours per week.