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As we enter spring, the days may be getting longer, but the average workday seems to be contracting. Corporate employees in the U.S. now seem to be ending their day at 4:39 p.m., according to a new report by the workforce analytics platform ActivTrak. That’s more than 40 minutes earlier than when workers clocked out just two years prior. While employees still start their day on average just before 8 a.m., the average length of the workday has dropped to about eight hours and 44 minutes. The report, which looked at data from nearly 220,000 workers at 777 companies, indicates that productivity has actually increased by 2% despite the slight reduction in time worked. Some employees seem to be embracing tactics like the Pomodoro technique and working in short bursts of time: ActivTrak found that the average “productive session” had jumped by 20%, from 20 to 24 minutes. (A productive session is defined as the time spent working without disruption.) There’s also some seasonal variability in working hours, according to ActivTrak. People tend to work more during the months of August and December, when they might be playing catchup after a vacation or hustling to meet end-of-year deadlines. Given the productivity figures and the prevalence of hybrid work, however, it’s possible that the workday has actually shifted more than shortened. People may be logging off earlier but then finishing up their work later or during weekends. (Since the workday timings are an average, some people could be working longer hours than what the report captures.) The report’s findings seem to support this idea: Employees are logging nearly 12 hours of work during the weekend, up from about 10 hours and 35 minutes. On average, about 5% of employees worked on the weekend in 2024, a 9% increase from the year prior. This was most common at larger companies with between 1,000 and 5,000 employees, where 12% of people worked on weekends. While U.S. employees may appear to be working less, it seems more likely that they’re leaning into the flexibility enabled by hybrid work. Long before the pandemic, many parents and others with caregiving responsibilities said they logged back on after hours to stay on top of their work. With more people now working remotely at least part of the week, it’s possible their days are truncated by doctors’ appointments and bedtime routines, leaving them to play catchup on weekendsor earlier in the morning. The report also found that on average, hybrid employees actually had longer workdays than people who were entirely remote or worked in the office full-time, which could be explained by greater variability in their schedules. The promise of a more flexible workday has driven much of the pushback to return-to-office mandatesand for good reason, if this report is any indicator. Employees seem to want the flexibility to set their own schedule, even if that means working during off-hours, and the variability in the average workday has not caused a dip in productivity. (In other surveys, workers repeatedly list a “flexible schedule” and the “ability to work remotely” as the top perks they seek in a job.) The ActivTrak report suggests that RTO policies don’t necessarily have a clear impact on output: In a case study of five companies, some saw an increase in productivity after implementing strict in-office mandates, while others saw a decline. While CEOs continue to extol the benefits of in-person collaboration, there’s little evidence that employees need to be in the officeor clock longer hoursto be effective in the workplace.
Category:
E-Commerce
The US Postal Service (USPS) will begin working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut costs. On Thursday, US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy signed an agreement with the Trump era organization, welcoming the agency’s infiltration, which other federal organizations have railed against in recent weeks. In a letter sent to Congress, DeJoy explained that DOGE will assist” USPS “in identifying and achieving further efficiencies” within the operation. DeJoy praised DOGE by saying, the “team was gracious enough to ask for the big problems they can help us with. It has long been known that the Postal Service has a broken business model that was not financially sustainable without critically necessary and fundamental core change.DeJoy was hired by President Trump in 2020 to head USPS as Postmaster General as it struggled financially through the pandemic. Under DeJoy’s leadership, USPS has already been slashing jobs since 2021. In the past four years, it has cut 30,000 jobs, and plans to make another drastic round of layoffs, cutting 10,000 more employees over the next month. Last month, DeJoy announced plans to step down from his role, as Trump announced he would make sweeping changes to USPS. He mused about firing the board and allowing the Commerce Department to seize control. “We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money. And we’re thinking about doing that,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office at the time. Doing so would be a step towards privatizing the postal service, something Trump has previously talked about. But, despite the call for massive changes, USPS is the federal agency Americans view most favorably, second only to the National Parks Service. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 72% had a favorable view of the postal service. In his letter, DeJoy pressed that USPS retirement assets and the Workers Compensation Program have been mismanaged” and the Postal Regulatory Commission, an agency which helps ensure the Postal Service operates transparently, abides by the law, and sets fair rates “unnecessary”. The agency “has inflicted over $50 billion in damage to the Postal Service by administering defective pricing models and decades old bureaucratic processes that encumber the Postal Service,” DeJoy said. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was quick to push back on the move, issuing a statement that sharply criticised DeJoy’s decision to work with DOGE. The only thing worse for the Postal Service than DeJoys Delivering for America plan is turning the service over to Elon Musk and DOGE so they can undermine it, privatize it, and then profit off Americans loss, Connolly said. He continued, This capitulation will have catastrophic consequences for all Americans especially those in rural and hard to reach areas who rely on the Postal Service every day to deliver mail, medications, ballots, and more. DeJoy’s agreement with DOGE comes as the agency moved to dismantle the department of education this week. On Tuesday, more than 1,300 workers were told they would be losing their jobs, halving the number of employees working for the department and sparking fears that school lunch programs will be likely to disappear amid the cuts. With research showing school meals are the healthiest meals Americans eat, Congress needs to invest in underfunded school meal programs rather than cut services critical to student achievement and health, said SNA President Shannon Gleave, RDN, SNS, in a statement this week.Gleave continued, These proposals would cause millions of children to lose access to free school meals at a time when working families are struggling with rising food costs. Meanwhile, short-staffed school nutrition teams, striving to improve menus and expand scratch-cooking, would be saddled with time-consuming and costly paperwork created by new government inefficiencies.
Category:
E-Commerce
Between rising tariffs, an increased cost of living, and extensive federal layoffs, February felt pretty abysmal for many American workers. Now, theres data to show that it might have been one of the worst months in recent history for employee sentiment. Thats according to Glassdoors monthly Employee Confidence Index, a report that uses Glassdoors database of millions of employees’ reviews to get a real-time pulse on employee confidence in their companys six-month business outlook, according to the companys website. Last month, the share of employees reporting a positive six-month business outlook fell to 44.4%its lowest point since Glassdoor began publishing the index in 2016 (for context, the average outlook hovers around 50% positive). Sentiments were low across the board, but some industries were hit harder than others. These are the sectors where workers felt the most pessimistic about the coming months: Government and Public Administration Over the past several weeks, Elon Musks so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been on a mission to reduce waste by slashing tens of thousands of federal jobs, including gutting the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), halving the Department of Education, and laying off 10% of the workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Not surprisingly, these massive cuts have resulted in rising job security fears among government employees. Employee confidence in the government and public administration sector plummeted by 4.9% month-over-month, bringing the total decline to 7.3% year-over-year. Cuts to the government workforce initiated by DOGE have thrown the future of the federal workforce into disarray, resulting in weakening sentiment, the report reads. Only 38.1% of government workers had a positive [six-month] outlook. Retail Dissatisfaction among government employees was matched only by retail workers. Similarly, only 38.1% of retail employees reported feeling positive about the futurethough, to be fair, thats only a 0.1% drop from this time last year. The retail industry has seen a barrage of headwinds in recent months. As the cost of living continues to rise, many consumers are opting to spend less, with major retailers including Walmart, Target, and Costco reporting noticeable dips in consumer spending last month. Meanwhile, the ongoing retail apocalypse has seen thousands of stores close across the nation, with companies like Joann fabrics and Party City going out of business entirely. Restaurants and Food Service Behind government employees and retail workers, food-industry employees were the third-most dissatisfied sector in the new report. The restaurant industry is currently facing down a number of potential tariffs that could make such products as coffee, tea, fruit, and vegetables much more expensive, and in some cases, inaccessible. Meanwhile, some of the nations largest fast-food chainslike McDonaldsare struggling to attract customers in an era of frugal spenders, who increasingly view meals on-the-go as a luxury.
Category:
E-Commerce
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