Employees spend more time collectively on emails, work meetings and chats than they do on other aspects of their jobs, a new study says.
At work, various forms of communication take up more than half of workers’ time, according to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index Annual Report, released on May 9.
Data is based on a survey of workers across industries in over 31 countries around the world and international usage data collected from Microsoft’s 365 apps, such as Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
The consistent influx of data, emails, meetings and notifications has outpaced a worker’s ability to process that information, the report says.
Surveyors reveal they are in meetings and calls three times more since Feb. 2020, making inefficient meetings the greatest productivity disruptor at 192 per cent. Having too many meetings ranks third on the list of disruptors.
Fifty-eight per cent of respondents say it is difficult to brainstorm in a virtual meeting, meanwhile 58 per cent say it’s hard to catch up if they’ve joined a meeting late.
Microsoft refers to employees not being able to keep up with emails, meetings and chats as “digital debt,” where a majority of time spent at work is attempting to catch up on communication and “to get out of the red” instead of completing work tasks.
“There are only so many minutes in the day—and every minute we spend managing this digital debt is a minute not spent on the creative work that leads to innovation. In a world where creativity is the new productivity, digital debt is more than an inconvenience—it’s impacting business,” the report reads.
Sixty-eight per cent of survey respondents believe emails, meetings and chats impede on their productivity, while 62 per cent say it takes too much time to find information needed to do their jobs.
According to the study, the average employee spends more than half of their time on communications at 57 per cent, and 43 per cent of their time creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
On average, the top 25 per cent of heavy email users spend 8.8 hours in their inbox per week, and the top 25 per cent of workers heavily involved in meetings spend about 7.5 hours per week in a video or audio call.
The Work Trend Index survey was conducted between Feb. 1 and Mar. 14, 2023 by an independent research firm, Edelman Data x Intelligence, among 31,000 full-time employed or self-employed workers across 31 markets.
