What Remote Employees Do During Working Hours: Not What They Should Be Doing

What do remote workers do all day? They often boast about their productivity because they are not distracted by gossiping colleagues or wasting time on the road, but are fully dedicated to work. In reality, things are a little different, writes USA Today.

Photo: Andrey Zhuravlev | Dreamstime.com

A new survey provides fresh insight into how remote workers actually spend their time. Spoiler alert: It's not all white papers and PowerPoint presentations.

While office workers might kill time by messaging friends or scrolling through TikTok, remote workers take advantage of being away from the watchful eyes of bosses to tackle personal to-do lists or goof off.

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Nearly half of remote workers multitask during work calls or do household chores like unloading the dishwasher or doing laundry while communicating about work, according to a SurveyMonkey survey of 3117 full-time workers in the U.S.

A third take advantage of the flexibility of remote work to go grocery shopping or dry cleaning.

Do remote workers sleep at work? It happens more often than you think. One in five remote workers admitted to dozing off in the middle of the workday.

About 17% of remote workers said they worked from another location without telling anyone, or watched TV or played video games. Some (4%) admitted to working part-time elsewhere.

Multitasking during Zoom calls is another common practice.

Nearly a third of remote and hybrid workers admitted to using the toilet during calls, while 21% said they browsed social media, 14% shopped online, 12% did laundry and 9% cleaned the kitchen.

In a result that may shock some, 4% do not hide the fact that they regularly go for a nap, and 3% take a shower during working hours.

“Employees make their own rules to fit the demands of the work environment,” said Wendy Smith, senior research manager at SurveyMonkey. “We found that what might be considered ‘informal behavior’ is widespread.”

And it's not just the rank and file. Smith said more than half of managers and 49% of executives also multitask during work calls.

When asked, “Have you ever looked at social media while on a video or conference call at work?” she found that roughly the same percentage of managers, executives, and individual participants said yes (22%, 20%, and 21%, respectively).

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But managers and executives shopped online more often than individual participants (16% and 14%, compared with 12% of typical employees, Smith said).

Different generations have different work habits:

• 26% of millennials admit to napping during the workday, compared to 16% of Gen X;
• 18% of Gen Z worked another job, compared to 2% of Gen X and 1% of Boomers;
• 31% of Generation Z worked from another location without telling anyone, compared to 16% of Generation X.

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