Most employees waste time on administrative work: Survey

Fifty one percent respondents said their worries about getting a decent job had increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown

Productivity of most employees is impacted by unrelated tasks and administrative work as 86 percent in a survey feel that they lose time each day on work-specific tasks but unrelated to their core job.

Nearly nine in 10 employees (86 percent) say they lose time each day on work-specific tasks unrelated to their core job, with 41 percent of full-time employees wasting more than an hour a day on these extraneous activities, according to a workforce management provider Kronos Incorporated survey.

The survey was conducted between July 31 and August 9 on 2,800 employees, both full and part, in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Mexico and Britain.

Additionally, 40 percent of employees waste an hour-plus each day on administrative tasks that do not drive value for their organisation, the survey reveals.

Servicing customers, patients or students, is one of the top tasks on which individual contributors (56 percent) and people managers (28 percent) usually spend majority of their time.

The next highest-rated daily tasks for individual contributors is collaborating with co-workers (42 percent), administrative work (35 percent), manual labour (33 percent) and responding to emails (31 percent).

While people managers list attending meetings (27 percent), administrative work (27 percent), collaborating with co-workers (26 percent) and responding to emails (26 percent) as the top ways they spend their workday.

The survey also reveals that full time employees feel 'Fixing a problem not caused by me' (22 percent) and administrative work (17 percent) as the top two tasks they waste the most time on at work.

Meetings (12 percent), email (11 percent) and customer issues (11 percent) round out the top five time-wasters, it adds.

Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) apparently waste the most time fixing problems caused by someone else (26 percent), while Gen Z (born from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s) is least-likely to clean up after others (18 per cent), yet they are most-likely to waste time on handling workplace conflict (9 percent).

Millennials blame social media as a time-sucker (10 percent) and agree with Gen X (born from early-to-mid 1960s to the early 1980s) that meetings (13 percent) are a waste of time.

Gen Z (10 percent) think talking on the phone is a time-waste.

Further, the survey reveals that worldwide 53 percent of employees feel pressure to work longer hours or pick up extra shifts to grow their career, came from within.

Of those who feel pressure to work longer, 60 percent put pressure on themselves while the rest say that pressure came from their managers, it added.

Workers in France (66 percent) and India (62 percent) feel by far the most pressure to work longer hours, while employees in Canada (38 percent), the US (44 percent), and Australia (47 percent) felt the least amount of pressure, it added.