To keep up with late calls and emails, more employees are punching back in after hours.
A Microsoft report published on Tuesday found that work is extending long past business hours. Meetings after 8 p.m. are up 16% compared to last year, and employees are sending and receiving over 50 messages outside their set hours.
The findings were based on Microsoft data and a survey of 31,000 full-time or self-employed white-collar workers across 31 countries between February and March.
Employees are giving up parts of their days off, too.
The survey found that nearly 20% of employees work on the weekend and check their emails before noon on Saturday and Sunday. More than 5% check their inboxes on Sunday evenings.
The tech giant blamed the extended hours on the rise of global and flexible teams and growing expectations from businesses.
“As business demands grow more complex and expectations continue to rise, time once reserved for focus or recovery may now be spent catching up, prepping, and chasing clarity,” Microsoft’s report said.
One in three employees said that “the pace of work over the past five years has made it impossible to keep up.”
‘Work intensification’
The results of Microsoft’s survey reflect a growing cultural shift in the way some of the world’s largest employers approach work-life balance and why employees feel compelled to work longer.
In recent months, tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon, and TikTok have cracked down on a US tech culture known for pandemic-era remote work, unlimited office benefits, top-line pay, and job security. Across the industry, creative perks like free massages have been replaced with memos filled with words such as “efficiency” and “scrappiness and frugality.”
It’s not just tech. From Wall Street to Walmart, companies are embracing the “great flattening — cutting middle-level management in favor of more streamlined teams and fewer tiers of hierarchy, which they say should lead to less bureaucracy.
As companies try to do more with fewer people, the end result is not always increased productivity, but burnout and detachment, workplace experts say.
Amanda Jones, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at King’s College London, told Business Insider last month that “work intensification” is on the rise and may do more harm than good.
“It’s going to not only cost more, but if we’re doing this to people in the skilled section of the workforce, it’s also not going to help us with our skills gaps, so productivity will reduce,” she said. “It does feel a bit like a race to the bottom.”
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