Long meetings, complexity and poor communication: Employees say they spend more than one full working day per week on activities that they consider to be of little use.
According to a study, German employees waste more than one working day per week through inefficient work activities. On average, they say they spend 8.7 hours of their working week on non-productive activities such as unnecessary meetings or redundant tasks. This emerges from a survey published today by the Stepstone job exchange among 5,800 employees.
“Waste of valuable time and valuable resources”
At the same time, more than one in two people (58 percent) say that processes that are too complex impair their own work performance. “If people cannot use their working time wisely, it is a waste of valuable time and valuable resources – especially when, due to demographic change, more people are leaving the labor market than are moving in,” said Stepstone labor market expert Tobias Zimmermann.
According to employees, there are several factors that could improve performance in the workplace: 46 percent would like clearer communication from their managers, 37 percent would like simpler processes. In addition, more training and development opportunities (30 percent) as well as investments in better technologies and tools such as artificial intelligence (25 percent) would support more effective everyday work.
“Modern technologies can help take over repetitive tasks so that people can devote themselves to meaningful and productive activities that match their skills,” said Zimmermann. Companies that specifically rely on automation, provide employees with appropriate training and further education and thus create better jobs would not only be more productive, but also more attractive employers.
Almost half are dissatisfied in their job
Almost half (45 percent) of those surveyed also stated that they were dissatisfied with the use of their own talents in the job. A third of these people (32 percent) suspect that they could achieve more elsewhere. The proportion is particularly high, for example, in the customer service (46 percent) and IT (46 percent) professional groups.
According to the information, almost half of all respondents are dissatisfied with their employer. 68 percent of them are actively looking for a new job. “We need everyone in the right job. To achieve this, the requirements of the workplace and the skills of the employees must match as closely as possible,” says Zimmermann.
Short breaks and a healthy lifestyle are important
The US company Slack also commissioned a survey in the summer and determined which disruptive factors limit productivity in the workplace. Almost every fourth employee with an office job is interrupted during an activity ten or more times a day. 32 percent cited distraction from colleagues as the reason. Close behind, at 31 percent, were ineffective leadership styles and too many and too long meetings.
From the perspective of the more than 2,000 office workers surveyed, further distraction arises from a lack of work-life balance (25 percent), an unhealthy corporate culture (23 percent), poor time management (23 percent) and inadequate technological equipment (23 percent).
The employees were also asked about various measures to increase productivity. They particularly often considered regular short breaks and a healthy lifestyle to be important or very important. This was followed by to-do lists and fixed time windows for individual tasks.
