Has your work/life balance gone out the window? Do you spend more time each week in the office than in your bed? You are not the only one.
Half of people who work full-time jobs in the U.S. are working more than 40 hours per week, with the average time being 46.7 hours per week, according to a Gallup study. This time of 46.7 hours is the highest since 2002, when the average was 46.9 hours.
This number increases if your job has you on a salary rather than an hourly ware, with 49 hours being the average workweek for salaried employees. But the number lowers to 44 hours when you limit the scope to those who are paid on an hourly basis.
"While for some workers the number of hours worked may be an indicator of personal gumption, for others it may be a function of their pay structure. Hourly workers can be restricted in the amount they work by employers who don't need or can't afford to pay overtime," said Gallup in the study.
When you examine Gallup's data on part-time workers in America, the difference over the years is even starker. The average part-time worker is on the job for 25.9 hours, which is way down from 35.4 hours in 2002.
And how many Americans are working the standard 40-hour workweek? Only 40 percent.
What about people who have more than one job? According to Gallup, only 12 percent have two jobs and another 1 percent have three or more. Looking at the 86 percent of full-time workers that are toiling away at a single job, the average is still 46 hours per week, barely dropping from the 46.7 hours that also includes those with more than one job.
What do these numbers from Gallup tell us? In the last decade, companies seem to be having existing workers do more work rather than hire new employees to pick up the slack. Part-time workers are also getting less hours, mostly like due to some of that work being offloaded to full-time workers.
But longer weeks isn't always a bad thing. According to Gallup, "Highly engaged workers who log well over 40 hours will still have better overall well-being than actively disengaged workers who clock out at 40 hours. In other words, hours worked matters, but it's not all that matters."
The data used in Gallup's report comes from the company's most recent Work and Education Survey, which uses data from 2013 and 2014. The company spoke with one random sampling of 1,032 people and another group of 400 full-time workers, for a total of 1,271 full-time employed Americans.
Photo: Katy Warner
