Prodoscore (“the Company”), a leader in employee visibility and productivity intelligence software, published proprietary data exploring year-over-year employee productivity trends, including a 5% dip in productivity on Fridays compared to mid-week. The data also reveals a number of employee behavior trends.
Productivity Differs by Season and Weekday
Looking at data for the last 12 months, Prodoscore saw a 5% dip in productivity on Fridays when compared to the rest of the week, with employees starting their day about 15 minutes later and ending their day 45 minutes earlier than mid-week. Additionally, the Company saw a 5% dip around April and May compared to the first quarter of the year, while February, September and October were the most productive months by approximately 5%.
Managers Differ in How they Communicate with Subordinates
Surprisingly, the data reveals that 61% of managers have not spoken to at least 1 of their team members in 1 week and only 16% of managers have daily contact with all of their team members. In fact, the average gap in communication between managers and employees is approximately 3-4 days.
The Company also discovered that a 6:1 employee to manager ratio is the sweet spot, showing that leaders who manage no more than 6 team members are the most consistent communicators while managers of more than 6 people do not maintain a consistent level of communication with all team members.
Remote Work is No Longer the Most Productive Option
Prodoscore found that hybrid is proving to be the best office setup. The data found that hybrid employees are close to 8% more productive than fully remote employees, and hybrid workers are, on average, 8.5% more productive on in-office days vs remote days.
For one Prodoscore customer, the top sales players were found to work 40 more hours per month than the low performers. Across data sets, high productivity employees were found to work close to 2 hours more per day than low productivity employees.
“These findings confirm a consistent trend in work habits and reinforces our message that the workplace needs to be flexible and adaptable based on the changes in employee behavior year over year,” said Adrian Reece, Vice President of Data Science at Prodoscore. “There is a strong case for a four-day work week, or even a modified version with a 4 ½ day week as companies are enforcing in-office and hybrid work more. We’ve seen a positive increase in morale in our clients that have updated their own hours and policies based on their company’s productivity intelligence, and we expect there to be additional changes throughout the rest of 2024.”
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