In a survey of employees in eight different countries, the vast majority—78 percent—say that if they could do their work without being interrupted, they could get everything done in less than seven hours a day. In fact, 45 percent say they could do it all in less than five hours a day.

Still, according to the survey from The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated, 71 percent say that work is interfering with their personal lives. And in the kickoff to a series by The Workforce Institute at Kronos and Future Workplace on how employees view their relationship with work, the first part—“The Case for a 4-Day Workweek”—explores how employees spend their time while on the clock and whether the standard 40-hour workweek is really the most effective.

Apparent contradictions in what employees say about how much work they have and how much time they need to do it includes the fact that 75 percent say they have enough time during the workday for major tasks. However, 37 percent work more than 40 hours every week, and 71 percent say that work interferes with their personal lives. If pay stayed constant, 34 percent of respondents say their ideal work week would be four days long, while 20 percent voted for three.

And while workers in the U.S. take the lead in working overtime hours, with 49 percent putting in more than 40 hours a week, 28 percent of individual workers and 24 percent of people managers would just catch up on their work if they were given more time in the workday.

Why would they have to do that, you may ask. Unrelated activity and administrative work, according to respondents, are taking a big bite out of the workday, with 86 percent saying that every day they lose time on work-specific tasks unrelated to their core job. In fact, 41 percent of full-time employees say they waste more than an hour a day on these extraneous activities. And 40 percent of employees say they lose an hour or more every day on administrative tasks that “do not drive value for their organization.”

So what are the biggest time wasters in a workday? Depending on their generation, workers' answers varied—“fixing a problem not caused by me,” at 22 percent, and administrative work, at 17 percent, were the top two answers overall, but 26 percent of boomers cited those problems caused by someone else and both millennials and GenXers–at 13 percent each–cited meetings as time wasters.

In addition, 53 percent of employees worldwide feel pressure to work longer hours or pick up extra shifts to grow their career, although among those who feel pressure to work longer, 60 percent put pressure on themselves while the rest say that pressure comes solely from their managers. And 79 percent of employees have at least some burnout, with 26 percent attributing it to unreasonable workload; 25 percent to “not enough time in the day to get job done”; 24 percent to a lack of skilled coworkers; 24 percent to a negative workplace culture / toxic team; and 21 percent to unfair compensation.

Instant Insights /

Is it time to switch to 4-day workweek?

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