For the past year and a half, small businesses across the country have had to make serious adjustments and, sadly, many have not survived the whims of the politicians. As retail continues to battle bravely against huge odds, the service oriented companies, and others, are finding that their workforce is now mostly remote. But is that really working? In some surprising data recently published by Zapier, it seems the remote idea may be leaving much to be desired. The following is taken directly from that published data:
-
Zapier surveyed 1,000 U.S. knowledge workers from small and medium businesses (fewer than 250 total employees). This survey was completed online using OnePoll in June 2021 and responses were random, voluntary, and completely anonymous.
-
Workers spend four to five hours a day on core job functions. The plurality of people (29 percent) say they spend 4-5 hours a day on their core functions. An alarming 18 percent said they only spend an hour or so each day on those core job functions.
-
The majority of workers spend less than three hours a day on impactful work. 81 percent of workers say they spend less than 3 hours a day on creative work, and 76 percent spend less than 3 hours a week on strategic work.
-
Workers spend a lot of time doing work outside their role. 83 percent of workers said they spend 1-3 hours a day covering for or making up work for a colleague.
-
Almost all workers spend a massive amount of time in chat apps. 90 percent of workers spend up to 5 hours a day checking work messenger apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
-
Human error is a huge time sink. 83 percent of workers said they spend 1-3 hours a day fixing errors.
-
The data entry struggle is real. 76 percent of respondents said they spend 1-3 hours a day simply moving data from one place to another. Additionally, 73 percent of workers spend 1-3 hours just trying to find information or a particular document.
-
Meetings aren’t the biggest issue. 45 percent of respondents said that meetings take up 1 hour of their workday; 38 percent said they spend 2-3 hours in meetings every day.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
