HRzone blogs

Premier Inn Survey: Are We Losing the Weekend?

Posted by ianprice on Tue, 23/11/2010 - 10:29
Back to blog homepage for: The Activity Illusion with Ian Price

The Lost Weekend may have been one of Billy Wilder's greatest movies starring Ray Milland but a survey conducted by Premier Inn and covered by the Daily Telegraph on Saturday suggests a new meaning.

Based on a survey of 4,000 workers, Premier Inn concludes that most Britons only enjoy a one-day weekend:

- they don't unwind until 12.38pm on Saturday night

- by 3.55pm on Sunday they are starting to worry about work again

- nearly half checked their email over the weekend

- 53% were "too tired" to fully enjoy the weekend

Is the weekend under threat from the trend towards boundary-less jobs, 24/7 communication and the pressure to be virtually present? Maggie Smith's Dowager asked in Downton Abbey "What's a weekend?" This was a fair question as workers still worked Saturday mornings in 1912 and had only just got Saturday afternoons off, hence the birth of professional football. This was thanks in part to technological progress. Forty years further on and Churchill, then PM had a vision of "giving the working man what he's never had - four days' work and then three days' fun."

So where did it all go wrong? Why has an era of accelerating technological advancement caused us to go backwards with leisure time so that the weekend is steadily disappearing?

 

ianprice's picture

The Activity Illusion with Ian Price

A blog by ianprice

I am an organisational behaviour specialist and author of The Activity Illusion. Formerly a corporate man, I have switched careers and was recently awarded a MSc in Occupational Psychology at Birkbeck College. Part of the reason I did this is because I was finding it increasingly hard to find work I could enjoy in corporate life. Everyone I worked with was frantically busy and yet so little was being achieved; this appeared to me to be the case the more senior the manager. I worked with people who were "too busy" to perform the basic functions of leadership - too busy to have team meetings, too busy to delegate, too busy to give feedback.

Create your free account

  • Access all articles in full
  • View multimedia
  • Receive email bulletins
  • Private messaging
Register now

Login

Forgotten your password?

Editor's Welcome

 

Hello! I'm a great believer in the power of stories, whether they be folk tales, novels, films or TV dramas.
 
They have a wonderful ability to get complex moral or social issues over to us in a palatable, easy-to-understand way and can provide many lessons if only we care to look just a little bit below the surface.
 
But they can also act as a fun starting point for discussion and debate on rather more serious topics that are all too often brushed under the carpet and ignored.
 

Hence our decision to start up a Review slot on the site to look at those everyday stories that are all around us from an HR perspective.

Although we've been publishing book reviews (take a look at our Book Club list of suggested possible non-fiction works for evaluation here) for some time, you may also have noticed that we've been running a weekly home page blog on The Apprentice courtesy of The Chemistry Group for a while now.

And Pauline Wood, managing director at specialist retail headhunter, court & spark consulting, was likewise kind enough to write our first film review on the Headhunters movie.

But the big question is, why don't you give it a go yourself? There's a world of choice out there and I, like the rest of the community, would love to hear your thoughts and insights.

So next time you watch a movie, see a TV drama or read a novel that you think has an HR message worth sharing, send your review to me at cath.everett@siftmedia.co.uk or post it directly to our blogs section at www.hrzone.co.uk/blogs.

So get critiquing and look forward to hearing from you very soon.....

Cath Everett
HRZone Editor 
 
 
Here's our pick of some of the latest hot topics on the site:
 

Spotligh on the Olympics