As many business leaders try to recreate employees’ working arrangements once again in hopes of restoring them to a resemblance to pre-pandemic environments, new data suggests the traditional 9-to-5 may be a thing of the past.
The ActivTrak Productivity Lab’s findings in its 2025 State of the Workplace Report indicate the workday now starts at 8 a.m. and ends at 4:39 p.m. That’s 7% shorter than the 5:21 p.m. workday conclusion time in 2022. However, despite the early employee exits, productivity rose 2%.
For finance leaders who have been tasked with pushing their teams back into the office regularly, being aware of these types of trends is valuable; especially as younger employees ditch the first-in, last-out mentality.
Remote employee productivity, utilization and workflow
When analyzing remote, hybrid and office-only employees, the most significant impact of the work environment was on collaboration time. Despite being in the same physical space as their coworkers, office-only employees said they collaborated for just 23 minutes, while those working hybrid or fully remote averaged over 42 minutes.
However, collaboration may be costing these employees, as they are 1.5 times more likely — compared with employees in all other working environments — to be overutilizing themselves. Office-only employees, ironically, are slightly more likely (4%) to consider themselves underutilized.
There are multiple findings surveyors refer to as “interesting paradoxes,” including the following.
- Remote workers have the highest productivity (+29 minutes per day) versus all other employees.
- Hybrid workers have the longest workdays — over an hour longer than single-location workers — but are the least productive in the group.
- Remote-only workers demonstrate greater total productive time and longer session durations, whereas office-only workers display higher focus efficiency and healthier work routines.
On average, employees say their daily habits at work are more productive than they were in years past. Productive sessions, or the average time employees work without disruption, rose 20% to 24 minutes at a time.
Focus efficiency, or the percentage of focused time relative to total time, decreased from 65% in 2022 to 62% in 2024. However, surveyors say that focus is dipping because of increased collaboration time — an effort CFOs and their finance teams across industries have worked to improve. Employees reported their time spent collaborating with others increased 27% (8 minutes per day) while multitasking increased 5% (4 minutes per day).
Work patterns and employee well-being
Nearly three-quarters of employees say they are maintaining a healthy work pattern, which is the highest level in three years. Despite financial woes for both executives and everyone else due to rising costs of living, employees’ mental health seems to be getting better.
When taking the Fed’s reiteration that economic improvement can only take place when wages catch up with inflation, employees waiting around for pay bumps in hopes of improving their mental health seemingly found other alternatives. In previous years, many CFOs may have allocated human capital spending toward employee well-being and mental health programs in the past but saw underwhelming results.
Weekend work is also rising and is up 5%. However, employees don’t seem to mind the extra weekend work — burnout risk dropped by 21%, while disengagement risk remained unchanged.
AI’s use and impact
AI use at work is up 107% year-over-year, with over half (58%) of employees saying they are now leveraging AI. However, despite its growing popularity among workers looking to supplement tasks, users report longer workdays (+8 minutes) and significantly lower focus times (-27 minutes).
ChatGPT is the most common tool being used by employees, with over a quarter (27%) saying it is their main tool. Overall, employees are spending 10 minutes per day using AI tools, a 48% increase from last year.
Best practices on AI, including companywide workshops dedicated to AI training, may be worth considering for CFOs as AI use is rapidly increasing but struggling at a corporate level and showing little sign of overall employee improvement in this report.
ActivTrak’s State of the Workplace report surveyed 218,900 employees across 777 companies. The study reflects actual user activity behavior recorded between January 1, 2022, and December 18, 2024.
