Employees Working More Under Work From Home; India At #4 In Longer Working Hours

Life before the pandemic was much cooler for lots of people as they could have a life of lie-ins and long lunch breaks.

Idyllic Time Vanished

But the pandemic imposed lockdown has changed that as now their new normal is working from home.

Now the daily routine has become less idyllic than earlier. 

The time people used to spend on daily commutes is now replaced by endless emails and video-meetings.

According to a latest report, people around the globe are working much  longer, on average, compared to the times before the pandemic.

The behaviour of users is observed in 65 countries by Researchers at Atlassian, a developer of workplace software.

Use Of Software For Measurement

For doing the measurement, they recorded the first and last times people interacted with the software on a weekday.

According to their findings, working hours started to lengthen during March, at the same time most Western countries introduced lockdown measures. 

Between April and May, the average working day was 30 minutes longer than it had been in January and February as shown in the chart.

Extra Time Efforts Applied By Different Country

As observed that workers in different countries applied different amounts of extra effort. 

Incase of Israelis, they extended their day by 47 minutes on average, which is longer than anywhere else. 

Contrary to that, South Koreans clocked up only another seven minutes.

While, Japanese just extended their working hours for 16  minutes. 

Only two countries, Brazil and China, recorded shorter working hours during the pandemic than before it.

India, UK and US reported that same time around 32 minutes.

Shift In Workload Distribution

Apart from the extended time duration, researchers also detected a small shift in how people spread their workloads over the day. 

For doing so, they counted the number of users online throughout the day.

According to these findings, people were doing a slightly smaller proportion of work in the middle of the day and most of the work in the mornings and evenings compared to time before the pandemic. 

What Is The Conclusion?

This shows that they were taking advantage of the extra flexibility afforded by working from home.

However, this also represents that the work was encroaching on what would have previously been free time.

Lets see if people continue to work from home in such numbers after the risk of covid-19 subsides. 

44% of American bosses think that their employees have become more productive during the pandemic, but only 28% of workers agree , as per the survey by PwC, a consulting firm.

But both agree to keep working from home at least a day a week. 

Whether it may be more productive or not, but everyone wants a bit more flexibility.