BlackBerrys have got a lot to answer for (the smartphone kind, not the fruit).
They helped fuel, in part, the trend towards out-of-hours working that we see today. After all, it’s hard to clock off at five o’clock if you’re receiving emails on your phone all evening.
It’s a scenario made frighteningly easy by the rise of what IT experts call BYOD, or bring your own device; when you use your personal smartphone to access work emails and applications. Its acronym may have been inspired by BYOB, but – I think we can all agree – it’s much less fun.
BlackBerry had its comeuppance, of course; its sales went off a cliff in around 2010 and never recovered. Today you’re more likely to be checking work emails on an iPhone or a Galaxy S. And many of us do; a survey of 1,056 UK business people today found that 20% of them were spending more than an hour each day checking work emails on their smartphone.
According to the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM), overtime is “firmly embedded in UK working culture”. Around 76% of people routinely work late in the office or at home; 48% skip lunch breaks; and a staggering 47% claim to work an additional 7.5 hours or more of overtime a week.
“Excessive hours are not sustainable – there are only so many times you can burn the midnight oil before your performance, decision making and wellbeing begin to suffer,” says Charles Elvin, ILM CEO.
The ILM study, by its very nature, gravitated towards the management end of the scale – but there seems little doubt that overtime culture is a real trend. We may not be working as long hours as the Japanese – who famously have a culture of staying as late as the boss – but actual weekly work hours are on the rise.
According to the ONS, there were 981.6 million hours worked each week in the UK between February and April 2014, up on 930.3 million in the same period in 2012. The number of roles (including people working two jobs) rose from 31.7 million to 32.1 million in the same time span. That works out at 29.4 hours a week per role in 2012, versus 30.6 hours a week in 2014.
We see the same effect on the shop floor, far removed from managers with their noses pressed to their BlackBerrys. In recent weeks The Grocer has reported on store management restructuring at Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and The Co-op. As roles are streamlined, staff are being expected to do more; an inevitable consequence of a competitive, squeezed grocery business.
On a macro level, all the economic indicators of late have been positive. The downside of this bright side is that we are working harder to get there.
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