How many hours do your employees actually do productive work in an eight-hour workday?


During the industrial revolution, people worked for 10-16 hours a day.

To make it more humane, Ford made it eight hours a day.

The idea was to have Eight hours of work, Eight hours of recreation, and Eight hours of rest.

In those days, most of the work was monotonous.

These monotonous jobs are now being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence.

We are now experiencing another revolution in the way we perceive our work.

We expect our employees to do design thinking.

According to a study, on average, employees work for only 3 hours out of 8 scheduled hours.

The most popular unproductive activities listed were:


  • Reading news websites- 1 hour, 5 minutes
  • Checking social media- 44 minutes
  • Discussing non-work-related things with co-workers-40 minutes
  • Searching for new jobs-26 minutes
  • Taking smoke breaks–23 minutes
  • Making Personal calls -18 minutes
  • Making tea or snacks -24 minutes
  • Texting or instant messaging-14 minutes
  • Eating snacks-8 minutes

How do you think the next productivity matrix will look?

Is it better to reduce the number of hours from 8 to 6 or 4?

Or, is it more effective to dispense with the number of hours as a measure of productivity?

Get all these questions answered in our next workshop “ From HR to CEO