With many workplaces offering flexible hours instead of working a typical 9-5, more and more people are finding themselves working a ‘triple peak day’.
Microsoft’s research found that the average Teams user now sends 42 percent more messages after hours, and this number is expected to grow.
So with the Triple Peak Day becoming more and more common, it’s important for managers and businesses to understand what it is and how it might impact their teams.
In this post, we’re going to cover:
- What is a Triple Peak Day
- How it can help and hinder work
- What can managers do to support their team
What is a Triple Peak Day?
Before flexible working, employers typically had two peaks of productivity throughout their workday. These occurred before lunch and after lunch.
But when more and more people started to work from home, a third peak emerged during the late evenings, now known as a ‘’Triple Peak Day.’’
So now employees are putting in most of their work during the morning, afternoon, and at night between 6 pm to 10 pm.
How does it help and hinder effective work?
For some people, working a triple peak day could help them combine home and work responsibilities, improving their work-life balance. With a better balance, they will be happier and more productive.
For others, there will be occasional days when they will want to stay up late to finish important tasks and meet their looming deadlines.
While working a triple peak day can seem helpful for some, it has an underlying problem.
Working all three peaks typically adds an hour or two on top of an average workday. If you think about how that adds up over a month – it could potentially lead to an additional 40 hours of work, which is basically another working week.
If your employees are always overworking, they’re running the risk of burnout, which will affect the quality of their work and their ability to meet deadlines.
So it’s important to reduce the risks of burnout by helping them find a better balance.
What can you do about it as a manager?
We’ve pulled together four things you can do to help your employees strike a better balance and reduce the number of triple peak days.
Find out which employees are working a Triple Peak Day
Before you can help your employees, you need to find out which ones are working a triple peak day by looking at their activity outside of normal working hours.
With collaboration analytics for Microsoft Teams, you can easily assess this for anything from individuals, to departments, to your whole business. Are meetings routinely scheduled out of hours, or do they overrun? For distributed teams over different time zones, can policies be put in place to schedule meetings more fairly?
On the flip side, if someone has formally requested flexible working, you could change their working hours and assess whether this change has made an impact.
Whether working out of hours is planned or ad hoc, analytics also make it easy to see changes in behaviour over time – often the best way to spot early signs of burnout.
Introduce a task management tool to help them plan their week
There’s a chance some of your employees are working overtime because they’re not planning their weeks and days effectively enough.
If they’re not considering how long tasks might take or the number of tasks they can fit within their working day, they’re probably going to set unrealistic expectations and then work long hours trying to deliver on them.
So it’s important they organise their week using a task management tool, so they can:
- Track their time spent on different tasks
- Organise and prioritise their tasks
- Simplify complex projects by breaking them down into subtasks and to-do-lists
Once the task management tool is up and running, you can then check-in on them using your Analytics 365 dashboard to see which employees are managing their time better and those who might need some additional support.
Talk to your employees and offer some guidance
Each employee will have different needs and challenges, some of which will be the reasons they are working round the clock to keep up.
You need to find out more about their situation to understand why they are spending more time in the evenings working.
So in your next 1-to-1 catchup, lightly discuss their working patterns and ask what’s causing them to work late. If something is in your control, like their workload, you can potentially put in place steps to offload some of it, or reduce some of their responsibilities.
Reduce the number of meetings during the day
HBR estimates that 70% of all meetings prevent employees from working and completing all their tasks. So if your employees have several meetings daily, there’s a good chance it’s taking up a large proportion of their time, forcing them to play catch-up in the evenings.
To prevent them from playing catch-up, they need to free up some time by drilling down on the meetings that are important and which ones can be cancelled. Our Meeting Analytics will give you some useful insights such as attendance, talk time and frequency – all factors that can help you decide which meetings deserve to stay and which ones need to go.
As a second measure, try and schedule meetings for just two or three days per week.
This might seem like a hard ask with everyone’s complex schedule, but these meeting-free days will help them zone in completely and get their work done in good time. A 2022 study found that 76 companies experienced a 71% increase in productivity and a 43% decrease in stress from just 2 meeting-free days per week.
So give meeting-free days a go, and you might see a reduction in working a ‘triple peak day’.
Summary
With flexible hours being offered in most organisations, a typical 9-5 workday is looking like a thing of the past. If you’re an organisation that offers flexibility, you want to ensure that their ‘Triple Peak Day’ is not leading to them working longer hours and causing burnout.
Therefore, we’ve come up with some things you can do to reduce the risks:
- Find out which employees are working a triple peak day
- Introduce a task management tool to help them plan their week
- Talk to your employees and offer some guidance
- Reduce the number of meetings during the day
Ready for your next read? Check out our posts on How to Monitor the Wellbeing of your Remote Employees, and 5 Mistakes Managers Make When Managing Remote Teams.
