The working day is undergoing some significant changes. Microsoft, which has 180,000 employees in 100 countries, has found that people who are working from home have three peak periods during a day that does not correspond to the usual 9am to 5pm work day of pre-pandemic times.
Microsoft has been analyzing work patterns among its employees who are working from home and what they’re experiencing with more flexible hours. One indicator of change is that when the pandemic began, meetings on Microsoft Teams were happening more frequently after 5pm, most often between 6pm and 8pm at night, according to Microsoft, which recently published its second annual Work Trend Index report.
The company’s data suggests that 9-to-5 is over and that meetings outside of previous norms are now common, creating a third peak of activity at night for some. Microsoft researchers call it the “triple peak day”.
“Traditionally, knowledge workers had two productivity peaks in their workday: before lunch and after lunch. But when the pandemic sent so many people into work-from-home mode, a third peak emerged for some in the hours before bedtime,” Microsoft notes in a blogpost.
The finding will likely not surprise parents who work and manage children after picking them up from school in the afternoon.
The average Teams user now sends 42 percent more chats per person after hours, according to Work Trend Index findings.
Microsoft found that 30 percent of its employees worked more at night based on “keyboard events”. That slight uptick in keyboard activity was much lower than traditional work peaks around 10am and 3pm, but around 10pm there is a spike.
The company doesn’t know why these employees work more at night. It could, for example, be because of childcare duties but also could be due to people collaborating across timezones.
April 8, 2022
By Liam Tung