According to a recent report from Microsoft, employees are now experiencing an “infinite workday” of constant emails, meetings, and notifications.
They check their emails as early as 6 a.m., juggle meetings through the afternoon, and then stay online well into the night.
Simply put, “it’s a very long day,” says Alexia Cambon, senior research director at Microsoft.
Beyond the extended hours, workers are also troubled by notifications. According to Microsoft’s data, employees are interrupted every two minutes by meetings, emails or messages, and receive an average of 117 emails and 153 Teams messages each workday.
As a result, they are feeling overwhelmed: 48% of employees and 52% of leaders reported that work feels “chaotic and fragmented” in Microsoft’s Work Trend Index survey, and 80% of global workers feel they lack sufficient time and energy to do their work.
“We know from survey data that people are feeling very burnt out,” Cambon says. “The multiplication, the intensity and the length of the workday [are] really creating a lot of friction for a lot of employees.”
According to Cambon, part of the root cause of the infinite workday is that work models haven’t evolved with the times.
Take meetings, for example. “It used to be that a meeting was the only way for us to really exchange information and progress items forward,” Cambon says.
Now, employees can easily connect asynchronously, but synchronous meetings still take up a significant part of the workday. Nearly a third of meetings take place across multiple time zones, and meetings that take place after 8 p.m. have increased by 16% year over year.
Additionally, technology has given us near-constant virtual access to each other, making it difficult to truly disconnect from work. On average, workers send or receive over 50 messages outside of “core business hours.”
“All of the signals that we usually relied on to tell us when to begin work and when to end work were no longer there,” Cambon adds.
The situation is so bad that, according to a new study by Kickresume, 80% of employees feel their jobs are responsible for their poor mental health and almost 40% of respondents have actually quit a job because of it.
It also revealed that 70% would turn down a high-paying gig if they weren’t offered any mental wellness benefits.
