9 in 10 UK professionals now working outside of office hours

15 comments

1. Definitely the case for me, although it’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes I will do some work on a Sunday afternoon/evening just to get ahead of the week. Still not worse than going into the office five days a week.

2. Pretty common. Sometimes I’ll check something or get some annoying and tedious crap out of the way.

3. I really wish people wouldn’t do this. It’s normalising round-the-clock working. People need to switch off and have time to relax.

   It’s now insane the number of work related messages and emails I get late at night and over the weekend.

   Luckily I now have a work phone that is given to work people and switched off outside of 9-6 on weekdays.

4. The more people that do this, the more companies will think its acceptable to expect or even demand. Unless you own or have significant shares in a company, you’re being played for a mug by working over or on your days off unless you’re being compensated for the extra time.

5. The flip side of the WFH revolution. Turning kitchens into meeting rooms blurred the line between work and life. Whilst it gives greater flexibility to fit your responsibilities around your commitments it’s absolutely cultivating a philosophy of “just because you’re not in the office that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be available”.

   There needs to be another conversation around boundary setting between bosses and their employees so that neither feels like they’re having the piss taken.

6. It’s fine to do… if its for a specific purpose / short term. It shows youre willing to put the work in when needed to help the team / company succeed. It’s also nice when this additional work is recognized…. ( Hint hint corporate overlords)

   This fails completely when it becomes BAU and the company gives you sweet FA in return! Your selling your free time for a pay cut. It’s illogical!

7. I have a ton of reports and papers that I need to read, and industry/govt updates to keep on top of. If I kept them all to my working hours, I likely wouldn’t have enough time to actually do any work.

   What I do not do is read emails, answer messages, take calls or anything else that directly relates to my job. Because I don’t get paid for out of hours working.

8. The way I see it, if you’re a salaried employee, you’re paid to perform a certain task, not to work a specific number of hours. I don’t think anyone disagrees with the idea that if you get all of your work done in the first two hours of the day, pissing about for the rest of the day is fair game. However, a corollary of that is that if you don’t get all of your work done in 8 hours, you need to keep going until you’re finished.

   Practically speaking, no professional job is ever going to have a perfectly uniform workload. There will always be chill periods and there will always be crunch periods. The vast majority of your value as a professional employee comes from how you deal with the one or two days a month when shit hits the fan.

9. So what lol… isn’t working whenever you want better than when you don’t want to?

10. I work in academia (cancer research). This has always been a thing. We would never get anything done if we stuck to a 9-5 hr routine

11. If only there was some kind of collective facility or structure where people could go on a time managed basis instead of spending their entire paid work day shopping, down the pub, having a wank, and then shoving all their work related tasks for the day into the very end of the evening.

    Alas and alack, huh?

12. I mean this is on the employee. You don’t have to answer the call from your boss if you are not working. You can choose to answer your phone or not. If someone else is working that’s fine you don’t have to join in. Just ignore it till you are working your hours.

    It’s not rocket science.

13. This is nothing more than a bad management problem. Middle managers should be proactively shielding staff from this.

    I’m a senior manager of WFH employees, both of my teams are told unequivocally to leave their desks at 5pm. I’ve had serious conversations with people who would not switch off and were experiencing burn out. I had one guy who was working 14 hour days and I was genuinely annoyed by it.

    If there is a team wide effort to get a project over the line, sure, short term bursts is fine. But it isn’t sustainable long term.

    Managers who are exploiting this are shithouses and shouldn’t be anywhere near a management position.

14. And personally I am fine with this. Sometimes in the evening I have a bit of inspiration and do some work for a while to act on it. Other times I run out of steam at 3pm and rather than grind through 2 hours I effectively power down and pick up the slack later when I have the motivation.

    Not all of us are fully motivated between 9am and 5pm, and given some leeway can actually work flexibly. So long as the work is done I don’t see an issue.

15. Unfortunately I am one of them, I was leading a team of 3 ppl, 2 have left and my company is not hiring due to hiring freezes… So I had to take of the slack… I am looking for greener pastures, but the UK job marked is cooked right now

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