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Some employees increase the number of night work sessions to progress on their professional missions. But this strategy turns out to be counterproductive and harmful to their mental health, as a Slack survey reveals.
In fact, around 40% of office workers say they regularly work overtime. It is interesting to note that most workers who work outside of working hours (54%) do not do so by choice. They feel obligated to do it.
For good reason, people who work overtime often feel like they don’t have time to accomplish all the items on their to-do list during their working day. Competing priorities prevent them from organizing their time as they see fit, which they believe harms their productivity.
Meetings are one of them. One in four employees believe that they spend too much time in these professional gatherings, which now take place remotely or around a table. This feeling is particularly widespread among managers, and more particularly senior executives (55%).
Some 25% of workers say they spend a large part of their time writing or responding to emails. And it’s not just an impression: office workers spend, each year, the equivalent of three weeks or even a month sorting their professional mailbox, according to a LiveCareer survey.
The increase in meetings and emails (but also notifications on professional inboxes) contributes to intensifying working days and making them less and less linear. Employees are often interrupted in their personal production, which pushes them to make up for lost time outside their usual hours.
However, working overtime repeatedly is not without consequences. Employees who feel obligated to work tend to be more stressed and more dissatisfied with their careers than their counterparts who stick to their working hours. They are also twice as likely to feel overworked.
Which can lead to fatigue, exhaustion… and a general drop in productivity. In fact, the Slack* report states that employees who feel obliged to work overtime are 20% less efficient during their workday. The height of irony.
*Some 10,333 workers living in the United States, Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom were surveyed for the purposes of this surveybetween August 24 and September 15, 2023.