Officebroker, the office rental service, has discovered that British office workers are trying to impress their manager by staying at work longer than necessary.
The company surveyed 500 office workers and discovered that 39% of them regularly arrived at work early or stayed late over the last 12 months, in an attempt to appear more dedicated than their colleagues. 26% said they always work a longer day than is necessary. Contractors working through an umbrella company may also feel tempted to do this if they want their contract to be renewed.
Staff are most likely to spend more hours at work if redundancies or a pay review are imminent, or if a new boss has recently been appointed.
Those working longer hours generally add between one and two hours a day to their working week but this is spent doing tasks such as organising their calendar and filing emails. Some employees even use this “overtime” for personal tasks like surfing the net and sending emails to their friends.
Chris Meredith from officebroker.com said this phenomenon of faking work does not bode well for the future of employees and employers. Although there has been a consensus that employees are working longer hours than before, it transpires that they are doing it to curry favour, rather than to deal with an extra workload.
Employees are sitting idly at their desks in a bid to impress their boss, and as a result their work-life balance is suffering. This has the knock-on effect of reducing productivity as the workers become increasingly tired.
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Image: alarm clock by paperfacets
