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Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | |
WORK-LIFE BALANCE
The rise of the infinite workday
Flexible work was the promise. The infinite workday is the reality
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IF IT FEELS like your workday never really ends, that’s because it doesn’t. According to Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index report, we’re now in the era of the “infinite workday” — a reality where employees are working longer, being interrupted more often and struggling to find boundaries between their jobs and their lives.
A trend that many started experiencing during the weird days of the pandemic appears to have taken root, Microsoft suggests. “The workday often begins before a lot of people are out of bed,” they wrote, with data to suggest that even by 6 a.m. many Microsoft users are going straight to their work email. Meetings all day are then chewing up all their focus time (noting that meetings are growing in volume and “sprawl”), and the data found that “remote workers now often see evening hours as a productive window.”
On top of all that, the data found a “notable bump in weekend email usage,” with five per cent of people doing work emails on Sunday evenings after 6 p.m. “For many, the workday now feels like navigating chaos ― reacting to others’ priorities and losing focus on what matters most,” Microsoft wrote. “Too much energy is spent organizing chaos before meaningful work can begin.”
“All of this is bad news for these workers and the people in their lives. It’s also bad news for their employers,” wrote Career Self-Care author Minda Zetlin. “Time away from work also makes space for greater creativity and the kinds of innovative ideas that only seem to come up when we aren’t at our desks. It’s clear that the ‘infinite workday’ is a bad idea all the way around.”
Microsoft’s point in bringing this up isn’t just to bemoan poor work-life balance, but to point out the trend is coming at the cusp of an AI revolution and that the creep of bad work practices puts that at risk. “AI offers a way out of the mire, especially if paired with a reimagined rhythm of work,” they argue. “Otherwise, we risk using AI to accelerate a broken system.”
“AI can give us the leverage to redesign the rhythm of work, refocus our teams on new and differentiating work, and fix what has become a seemingly infinite workday,” Microsoft wrote. “The question isn’t whether work will change. It’s whether we will.”
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REMOTE WORK
The RTO crossroads
Banks are rolling out return to office mandates and pushing for increased in-office presence. But is anyone listening?
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OVER THE LAST month or two, major Canadian banks have been turning the screw on their RTO mandates. In early June, Scotiabank announced a four-day in-office requirement. RBC did the same thing last month.
The announcements came with the now-boilerplate justifications: “Spending more time together in the office enables more effective collaboration and problem-solving and ultimately provides more opportunities to develop one’s career,” a Scotiabank memo to staff said.
Some are praising it. “For banks, a return to office is critical to achieve optimal productivity,” wrote the Globe’s John Turley-Ewart.
Okay, but will it actually work? Not as in, will it make employees more productive ― but will the mandates make people come back to the office? That’s where the data paints a more complicated picture.
The Flex Index, a project from WFH thought leader and Stanford professor Nick Bloom that purports to offer a modelled estimate of actual office attendance among large corporations and financial institutions, has keyed in on an interesting piece of information: when it comes to office attendance, a clear compliance gap exists. “While required office days have increased 10 per cent since Q1 2024, attendance has fluctuated between one and two per cent higher,” the data found. For all of the investment being made in improving office attendance, the result, said Bloom, is attendance that is “flat as a pancake.”
There’s a couple of interesting explanations for this. One is that good employees have enough inherent leverage to basically ignore the mandates “Managers facing pressure to ‘do more with less’ are unlikely to terminate high-performing employees whose only shortcoming is imperfect attendance,” wrote Brian Elliot. “The silent agreement between managers and their best talent is evident.”
Another sticking point is the offices themselves. “Staff believe bank leaders have not made the transition back to the office easy,” wrote Turley-Ewart, noting that staff are irritated with hot desking and desk hotelling. “When bank CEOs make that ultimate call to their employees to return to the office, it is their job to offer offices that staff want to return to.”
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Terry Talk: Why your employer brand matters
| What if employer branding isn’t just HR fluff, but a real business growth engine? In this short video, Ahria Consulting president & CEO Terry Gillis discusses three proven ways to build a brand people want to work for: starting with your employee value proposition, empowering your people as storytellers and improving the candidate experience. | | | |
HEALTH & WELLNESS
A Lego for your troubles
Lego as a benefit? A perk from Deloitte sparks bigger conversation of workplace stress
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EVER HAD A week at work so bad that you needed to sit with your nephew’s Legos for an hour just to unwind? And how much better do you think that would be if your work covered the cost of some Legos of your own?
Better ask some Deloitte employees. The consulting firm has, for a long while, provided its U.S. employees with up to $1,000 to cover their wellbeing (think gym memberships, yoga classes and so on). But now it is allowing them to use that money to purchase Lego if they wish.
Some Deloitte employees are reportedly having fun with the idea. "Most of the responses are things like ‘Lego?!?!? Finally!’ or jokes about how they can now rationalize buying the coveted Millennium Falcon Star Wars Lego set," one employee told Business Insider. Others interviewed said it was a genuinely appreciated move. “Knocking out a four-hour Lego build in under two hours is a great stress reliever,” another said.
This will be no surprise to long-time brick-heads. “Ninety-three per cent of adults regularly feel stressed, while 86 per cent of adults claimed that play helps them to unwind,” wrote Lauren Bromley-Bird. “As a Lego fan myself, I can certainly vouch for this.”
Others, like Aflac HR head Matthew Owenby, say that addressing the burnout epidemic is not quite as easy as providing a stipend for puzzles and building blocks. “Five years after the Covid -19 pandemic first started a national conversation around mental health and employee burnout persists at very high levels,” Owenby told Fast Company. “When asked about the most effective ways to address burnout, employees offered simple and straightforward solutions: giving employees the option to work from home, increasing paid time off, and creating company-sponsored self-care programs.”
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CULTURE
The AirPods obsession
Hey, do I have your attention? I can’t tell because your AirPods are in
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THERE IS SOMETHING about the modern AirPods that have completely changed the way people are using headphones these days. It’s becoming more and more common to see people with AirPods in all the time ― when talking to other people, ordering at Starbucks or sitting through a doctor’s appointment. Or, at work.
“It’s workers who now find it totally acceptable to do their very customer-facing jobs while other voices fill their ears,” wrote Lauren Weber in the Wall Street Journal, noting that the practice has become so engrained with work for some people that “several workers said they grew their hair long so managers and customers could no longer see the offending devices.”
We will never really settle the debate on whether headphones are good or bad for people. Haters will suggest that staff wearing earbuds “kills the sharing of ideas and innovation;” lovers will say that headphones “are an essential component of my work process. Everyone has their own way to be most productive.” Disabled workers will point out that they are in many cases a kind of accessibility device.
But that’s not the new behaviour here ― it’s the wearing them all day long, whether they are on or off, that is new and unusual about the modern AirPods. In one curmudgeonly missive about it, Danny Katz wrote in Good Weekend that “you see so many people walking around with little white cigarette butts hanging out of their ears, it’s as if they were told that smoking orally is bad for you so they’ve decided to try it aurally.” (Clever.)
One doctor quoted by WSJ said that it is something they are seeing more frequently even among patients coming into their office. Nobody, it seems, wants to take the AirPods off. “It’s the unknown that’s sort of uncomfortable,” one said, referring to the question of whether the earbud was on or off. “It seems like you’re not giving me your full attention.”
There was one reasonable defense of the always-in practice (at least in the view of this author, chronic loser of things), offered by a 55-year-old IT worker named Joseph Montes. “If you take it out and put it in your pocket, it can end up in the laundry, and you’ve just washed a $250 piece of technology.”
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