Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

On The Mind

By Times Wires
Published October 12, 2007

Biz tidbits from surveys

Meetings drive you to secret shopping?

If your attention is drawn to shoe sales instead of sales figures during work conference calls, you're not alone, says a phone survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by Bill Me Later, an online payment service, and Ipsos Insight:

- More than 12-million Americans admit to shopping online at least once over the past year during work-related conference calls.

- One-million of those shoppers got caught, and reactions ranged from embarrassment to seeking out second opinions from co-workers on the items they bought.

- The respondents who confessed included more men than women, and the most frequent shoppers were college-educated, aged 35 to 54, and earned more than $50,000 a year.

- About 23 percent of covert buyers admitted to browsing for a trip to Florida or a new blender at least five times in the past year.

- 12 percent said they shopped online at work 10 or more times during the past 12 months.

It really is harder now to escape work

A recent report by Robert Half International shows financial professionals are putting in more hours on the job than two years ago. The survey of more than 2,200 financial managers in 17 countries shows:

- 45 percent of U.S. finance managers said their hours have increased over the past two years. Among those, two-thirds said they work an additional five to 15 hours a week.

- U.S. respondents say they work an average of 40.9 hours per week, which is third from the bottom and well below the 42.2 hours worked in Germany, 43.8 hours in Italy and 47.1 hours in Japan. Luxembourg workers top the list at 47.6 hours.

- Nearly four out of 10 of U.S. respondents said they sometimes or always take their laptops or PDAs on vacation, compared with 16 percent in Ireland, a country near the top in hours worked.

- Only 32 percent of U.S. practitioners said they never work weekends, versus 65 percent in Spain and 51 percent in New Zealand. A quarter of U.S. financial professionals say they work three or more weekends each month.

- The most popular reasons for an increase in work hours are more responsibility (56 percent), company growth (45 percent) and understaffing (27 percent).

Dread review time?Try twice a year

The annual performance review still reigns in large companies, but there's been a significant upswing in the twice-a-year review, according a recent survey by the executive staffing service Office Team.

- Asked how often they conduct reviews, 58 percent of surveyed executives said once a year, and 31 percent said twice a year.

- When the same question was asked in 2002, 66 percent answered once a year, and 19 percent said twice a year.

[Last modified October 12, 2007, 01:13:12]