The 2026 Global Trends and Benchmarks Report: How Work Gets Done

Work has changed faster than most teams have had time to redesign it. Global collaboration is now normal, tools have multiplied, meetings fill the calendar, and AI is everywhere.

That said, many organizations are still relying on inherited assumptions about productivity, that:

• More availability equals more output.
• Meetings are the safest default.
• Long weeks are just the cost of getting important work done.

The result isn’t that people aren’t working hard, but that work itself has become harder to do well.

Our 2026 Global Trends and Benchmarks Report: How Work Gets Done looks at these patterns using anonymized data from more than 140,000 workers across 17,000 organizations, all of which use Hubstaff.

Instead of debating remote versus office or productivity theory, it examines how work unfolds across roles, time zones, and workstyles.

Focus time has become the rarest resource, but teams don’t notice until it’s gone

Most teams don’t realize they have a focus problem until results start slipping.

Work feels busy but strangely incomplete. People log on earlier or stay later, not because they want to work more, but because it’s the only time of the day that feels quiet enough to think.

The data in our report uncovers that pattern. Across over 140,000 workers, uninterrupted focus now accounts for an alarmingly small share of the workday. On average, people get about 2–3 hours of real focus per day, and that number drops further depending on role and workstyle.

• Across all roles, only ~39% of tracked time is spent in deep focus.
• Hybrid teams average just 31% focus time, significantly lower than office-based (45%) and fully remote teams (41%).
• Highly collaborative roles like product managers, project managers, and founders often fall to 1–2 hours of focus per day, with focus percentages in the mid-20s.
• More than 20% of the time is spent on “work about work”: meetings, status updates, searching for information, and coordination.

What’s striking is how collaboration is distributed.

Meetings, for instance, aren’t confined to clear blocks. They’re spread evenly across the day, slicing potential focus windows into fragments too small to support deep work. A standup here, a quick sync there, or a review late in the afternoon. While each appears reasonable on its own, they are collectively corrosive.

The implication is uncomfortable but useful: focus isn’t inherently something people can “protect harder,” but an outcome of system design. 

Focus breaking down is typically a signal that capacity, expectations, or collaboration norms need adjustment. Very rarely does it imply that people are underperforming.

Long workweeks don’t happen by accident

Long weeks don’t usually arrive all at once. They often start with a few late nights here and there — but suddenly that time adds up. One day, a 50-hour week stops feeling like an exception and starts feeling normal. By the time leaders notice, the pattern is already baked into how work gets done.

When we looked at weeks that crossed the 50-hour mark, long hours weren’t evenly distributed. Instead, they were clustered by role, showing that individual effort and motivation aren’t driving factors.

• 28% of team leads and managers logged at least one 50+ hour week.
• 21% of customer support roles crossed that threshold.
• 18% of sales and marketing roles did the same.
• By contrast, engineers showed fewer extended weeks, with under 5% of all observed weeks exceeding 50 hours.

If long hours were simply about work ethic or ambition, the pattern would be random. Instead, the same functions keep absorbing the pressure. That’s usually where demand, coordination work, or unclear scope has outpaced capacity.

There’s a temptation to treat these weeks as necessary pushes. However, research has been consistent for decades: beyond roughly 50–55 hours, output plateaus. 

Fatigue, on the other hand, does not. The extra time rarely produces proportional results.

Hours matter more when you can see them

Most leaders don’t lack concern about overwork, but they often lack visibility into where it’s coming from. By the time long weeks show up in a conversation, they’ve usually been there for a while. From the outside, everything still looks functional.

But that’s the problem: Hours on their own don’t explain much. What matters is patterns themselves. Some great questions to ask are:

• Which roles are consistently stretched?
• When do long weeks appear during the cycle?
• How often does focus break down before hours expand?

Without that context, long weeks get treated as anecdotes instead of signals. Leaders rely on gut feel or after-the-fact conversations about burnout to understand what’s happening. By then, the system has already adjusted to account for the strain.

Making hours visible means seeing the workload clearly enough to design it better. When time, focus, and capacity are observable at the team level, preventing long weeks becomes more attainable.

That’s the shift this report is designed to support: moving from reacting to overload after it shows up, to recognizing the early signals while there’s still room to change course.

Get the full report: The 2026 Global Trends and Benchmarks Report

Inside the report, you’ll find role-level benchmarks, patterns across global teams, and practical signals leaders can use to spot problems early and redesign how work flows day to day.

It’s built on anonymized data from more than 140,000 workers, with the goal of replacing guesswork with clearer visibility into how time, focus, and capacity interact.

Download the full report to see how your team compares and where small changes in design can make work more sustainable without asking people to stretch further.