Weekend hours rise in era of layoffs
Working on the weekend is becoming more commonplace in some sectors as layoffs increase and workers seek time to focus, free from the deluge of meetings and other distractions.
The average hours worked on Saturday and Sunday last year increased 5 percent to 6.6, according to ActivTrak, which analyzed almost 175 million hours of work across 134,260 anonymized users of its productivity-management software worldwide. While just 5 percent of all workers tracked toiled on the weekend, certain industries, like technology and media, saw a spike of 25 percent or more hours worked in 2022 compared with a year earlier. The reasons are twofold: Job cuts that have heaped more work on fewer staffers, along with a need to escape the constant interruptions from the likes of Zoom calls and Slack chats that
are part of today’s increasingly hybrid workplace.
“With more and more layoff announcements, companies are doing more with less, so where you see an increase in weekend work, it’s in industries that are contracting,” said Gabriela Mauch, vice president of ActivTrak’s productivity lab, which researches trends in its data sets. “As people become more comfortable with flexibility, it’s acceptable to log off at 3 p.m. on a Friday and deal with the
work on the weekend.”
The weekend shifts are the latest example of the breakdown in longheld workplace norms wrought by the pandemic, as demands for increased flexibility among employees clash with some employers’ desires to see workers in person at the office more often.
The most common weekend warriors were technology staffers in computer hardware and services, according to ActivTrak’s data, along with media workers and those in consumer goods. All of those groups increased their weekend hours last year compared with 2021, most by double-digit percentages.
Other sectors, like energy, hospitality and health care, saw a decline in weekend toiling. One theory behind the divergence, Mauch said, is that industries with a greater share of creative types could see more value in working over the weekend. Servicefocused sectors were also more likely to boost their weekend hours. A broader government survey found Americans spent 1.1 hours working on the weekend in 2021.
The ActivTrak report also found that the average workday in 2022 spanned 10 hours and nine minutes, defined by the stretch between the first and last activity on a worker’s computer. Time spent on focused work declined slightly last year, while minutes spent multitasking increased by a similar amount.