Commuters are stuck in traffic on southbound Interstate 5 during the afternoon rush hour en route to downtown San Diego in San Diego, California on March 12, 2024.
Kevin Carter |
While young professionals are falling back in love with the aesthetic of the nine-to-five job – known as “corpcore” – few are putting in the hours in the office necessary to back up the trend.
Despite renewed interest in work-appropriate clothing (think the corporate version of quiet luxury: tailored suits or blazers and pencil skirts), the standard 40-hour workweek is dead, new research shows—at least as far as commuting is concerned.
As more commuters take advantage of flexible working hours, the traditional American 9-to-5 workday has transformed into a 10-to-4 workday, according to the 2023 Global Traffic Scorecard released in June by INRIX Inc., a traffic data analytics company. The analysis shows fewer early morning trips and a higher volume of midday trips compared to pre-pandemic traffic patterns.
The working day is getting shorter
Today, there is a “lunchtime rush hour,” according to the INRIX report, with almost as many trips to and from the office being made at lunchtime as at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
“There's less morning commute, less evening commute and a lot more afternoon activity,” said Bob Pishue, a transportation analyst and author of the report. “This is more of the new normal.”
Commuters have also all but abandoned public transit. As data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows, ridership plummeted during the pandemic and never fully recovered.
The result, according to Pishue, is an increase in traffic congestion during peak hours at midday and in the evening.
“Before Covid, there was a peak in the morning rush hour and then the evening peak was much larger,” he said, describing two peaks with a valley in between. “Now there is no valley.”
“Coffee badging” is the worst of all
“Employees have become accustomed to the flexibility of working from home and may only come into the office when absolutely necessary,” said David Satterwhite, CEO of Chronus, a software company focused on improving employee engagement.
“That means they might leave early to catch the train home, come in later, or stop by for a quick meeting and then leave,” Satterwhite added.
The habit of only going to work for a few hours a day, also known as “coffee badging,” has, as other recent reports show, become widely accepted or at least tolerated.
More than half (58%) of hybrid workers admitted to logging into the office and then immediately checking out, according to a separate 2023 survey by Owl Labs, a maker of video conferencing equipment.
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“We used to call it the jacket-on-the-back-of-the-chair syndrome,” says Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice at London Business School.
Regardless of whether a company has a strict return-to-work policy or some variation of a hybrid plan, “organizations need to clearly define what the deal is,” she said, “and each individual employee can decide whether they want the deal or not.”
However, since most people say they don't want to come into the office because of the commute, grabbing coffee is the least successful compromise, Gratton added. “That's the worst of all: you're still commuting, but you're not spending the hours in the office.”
Productivity suffers
Some employees are struggling with burnout and their commitment has waned.
After years of upward trends, workplace engagement has stagnated. Now, only a third of full- and part-time workers say they are engaged with their work and workplace, while about 50% are disengaged, as reflected in the rise in “silent resignation.” The rest, another 16%, are actively disengaged, according to a 2023 Gallup poll released earlier this year.
According to a Gallup study, unmotivated or actively disengaged employees are responsible for approximately $1.9 trillion in lost productivity across the country.
As other studies show, employees today place more value on work-life balance, flexible working hours and mental health support than on professional development. And fewer want to spend even more time in the office than they already do.
If the option to work from home were taken away, 66 percent of workers would immediately look for a job that offered them more flexibility, Owl Labs found – and a large portion of those workers, about 39 percent, would quit immediately.
“We need to get a clearer description of how to work most productively. And that requires a leadership team that sees this as an opportunity to redesign work and not simply react to what happened during the pandemic,” Gratton said.
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