The office has gone by a sea-change for the reason that onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when places of work and workers had been compelled to undertake a distant fashion of labor. It kicked off the Nice Resignation, quiet quitting and chaotic working, during which workers take management of their work lives. 

However three years on, as enterprise largely trickles again to regular, workers are more and more having to juggle a brand new burden: working over the weekends. Whereas latest office developments have principally favored flexibility and prioritizing worker well-being, a good labor market and huge adoption of distant work expertise have compelled some to a piece week that has no finish.

On common, staff put in additional hours on Saturdays and Sundays final 12 months than in 2021, in response to a report by ActivTrak, a office software program firm. Solely 5% of all folks surveyed labored by the weekend in 2022. Their time on the job elevated by 18 minutes to a median of 6.6 hours. 

However for another industries, the variety of weekend hours rose sharply. Within the tech business, the variety of weekend hours soared 31% to 11.5 hours on common, whereas media staff put in 53% extra time on the weekends, for a median of 10.7 hours. 

ActivTrak’s report identifies workers of pc {hardware} firms and media companies as having the largest positive factors in weekend working hours in 2022. The tech business has been notably hard-hit by layoffs at firms like Amazon, Alphabet’s Google, Salesforce, and Twitter. Because the begin of 2023, over 122,000 tech staff have been laid off from greater than 400 firms, in response to layoff tracker, Layoffs.fyi.

The report identifies two causes for the weekend toil. First, mass layoffs, particularly in tech, made it vital for workers to pile on a higher workload to make up for the shortfall in headcount. Second, workers attempting to flee digital calls and conferences within the hybrid office are more and more discovering weekends to be the one time they’ll work freed from distractions. 

“As firms downsize and try to do extra with much less, it’s very potential that work is extending past the 5-day work week and into the weekends,” Gabriela Mauch, vice chairman of the productiveness lab at ActivTrak, advised Fortune. “We’re apt to see much more experimentation as firms start to appreciate their method to work have to be uniquely suited to their enterprise and their folks.”

The report from ActivTrak appears to be like at knowledge collected from 134,000 workers in 2021 and 2022 to look at tendencies in productiveness, expertise, and employee well-being. 

The choice to work remotely has benefited staff by saving them hours of weekly commuting and boosting productiveness. However hybrid work hasn’t been unanimously profitable—some girls have struggled to attract boundaries when on hybrid schedules and staff could miss out on elements that they need of their skilled lives comparable to autonomy and connectivity.

The report additionally highlights tendencies within the digital office, as soon as touted because the “new regular,” which can be changing into merely “regular” as workers tailored extra completely to the adjustments of the previous few years. 

“Over the past 3 years, flexibility has grow to be considerably extra acceptable and for some, this implies choosing a shorter week-day and shifting a part of the workload to the weekend,” Mauch mentioned.

Even with higher flexibility in work fashion, worker well-being stays in danger. Burnout amongst American staff continued at an alarming fee of 89% in 2022. And whereas firms are being extra proactive in serving to their workers get the assist they want, even high-level executives are grappling with related struggles.