19th July 2011

 

55% of office workers said they engage in other activities besides eating during their lunch hour in a typical office week, and of those, nearly 40 percent said they have exchanged their traditional lunch hour for some extra time to catch up on their work.

 

Office workers take, on average, only 36 minutes for lunch each day, with 14% not taking any time for lunch in the average work week. Surveys also show that men and women are almost equally inclined to skip their lunch entirely, with 15 percent and 14 percent respectively passing on the mid-day intermission.

 

Aside from eating;

• 53% socialise with friends
• 44% run errands
• 38% have a working lunch with colleagues
• 37% read
• 28% telephone friends or family members
• 27% go shopping
• 14% exercise
• 9% use the time to go to the doctor
• 6% check in on the kids in day care
• 1% use that time to go on job interviews.

 

During their lunch hours, women are more than twice as likely as men to go shopping (37 percent versus 17 percent). However, men are only slightly more inclined to take clients to lunch than women (21 percent versus 16 percent) and typically take 10 percent longer for lunch than women.

 

Interestingly, despite the change in work ethic, 84 percent of the 298 office workers surveyed said they feel no guilt whatsoever about taking a full lunch hour.

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