More evidence your work/life balance has gone to $%£*: Atlassian says user-interface interactions show hours tacked on to workday
- Reference: 1604690048
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/06/atlassian_work_life/
- Source link:
The publication follows other [2]reports confirming that for many, the 9 – 5 grind is a thing of the past as boundaries blur and work seems to expand to fill the hours available.
Data Scientists, including Atlassian's Arik Friedman, took a look at the analytics events fed back to the mothership from Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket. In particular, the team looked at user interface interaction in order to weed out scripts and system shenanigans. The activities captured included events such as creating a document or commenting on a code review.
The first and last times of user activity were used to give an approximate length of a workday.
Work life balance? We've heard of it. Pandemic means 9-5 shifts are a thing of the past for many [3]READ MORE
The results, according to Friedman, were "striking". The team aggregated the data from January to February 2020 and compared them with April to May 2020 and found pronounced differences in many countries. UK users added half an hour to their days (mainly at the end) while those from Israel gave up an extra 47 minutes to the world of work.
Atlassian's figures are interesting, since they capture the intensity of work during the day. Decreases were seen post-lockdown during regular working hours (compared to life before COVID-19) and increases outside.
"Working an extra hour in the evening," explained Friedman, "doesn't necessarily mean you're working less in the morning; it's just that mornings now comprise a smaller relative proportion of the workday."
Many are accustomed to extended working hours in short, sharp bursts but workdays simply blurring into home life over a lengthy period of time runs the risk of staff burn-out.
"We need to find effective ways of 'switching off'," said Friedman.
Perhaps by setting a reminder for the end of the working day, or by muting phone notifications when the day is done. Not a bad idea even before the pandemic was a thing.
Friedman also suggested that managers should check in on the well-being of their team and include chitchat about outside-work activities as well as encouraging staff to actually use those end-of-day reminders. Setting an example by turning off their own notifications out-of-hours would also do no harm.
"Remote work," said Friedman, "will be part of our lives to some extent for a long time."
"The question now is whether we can find a way to make remote work work – for everyone." ®
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[1] https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/data-analysis-length-of-workday-covid
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/16/work_life_balance/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/16/work_life_balance/
[4] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Not me ...
If you're an exempt employee in the US -- salaried, in other words -- you don't have regular work hours and you don't get paid overtime. These days you work to keep your job, its as simple as that.
I must admit that measuring the first and last events is highly suspect.
We have a lot of people working from home here and I know for a fact that, for many, working from home affords a more flexible attitude to working hours.
Longer lunch break, the opportunity to do the shopping when it is quieter during the weekday, doing more activities with the kids and then working later in the evening.
I have no doubt that for some, there are more work hours being done, but I would be very suspicious of drawing too much from those statistics.
Work is work, and my home life is my own
I suppose I could be accused of being a 'clockwatcher' but the idea of responding to work calls and emails outside of work hours is a complete non-starter for me.
Voicemail and email is there for those times I am not 'at work', even when I'm working from home. Once you start down that slippery slope of essentially being on-call at all waking hours, it's hard to claw your personal time back. Before the pandemic, I might have taken my laptop home with me less than a half-dozen times in 5 years, while my co-workers did nearly every night. Still don't understand that mindset.
Pub!
"You're probably reading this on your work laptop when you should have been down the pub"
Please tell me and the rest of the UK where?
Elephant in the room
It's a joke when Atlassian, of all companies, makes statistical inferences about use of their products.
The activities captured included events such as creating a document or commenting on a code review.
The time spent clicking, and waiting and waiting, then clicking again 5 times (with attendant waiting), to get a simple Jira issue opened, or cross-linked, or a report written is just too much. Jira is such a piece of 1990s work. Yuch.
It's no wonder people have to work longer. They are waiting for Jira to catch up to their slow human reflexes.
Not me ...
My boss wants me to work longer than prescribed hours will pay overtime or else he can go forth and multiply.
I wasted time doing work during my time and got nothing for it so, to put it politely, fuck'em.