When was the last time you took a proper lunch break? We're not talking about a Pret salad al-desko or a quick dash to Tesco while you fire off a few emails, but a proper hour long break from the office. Probably not that recently, eh?
While the majority of job contracts stipulate an hour long lunch break, the reality is most offices have a culture where taking your full sixty minutes is frowned upon. New research from Workthere.com supports this theory with their findings suggesting that the average worker in Britain takes just 34 minutes for their lunch.
As Refinery 29 pointed out, that's 26 whole minutes of stolen time which when multiplied by the number of days in a working year (252 days) comes to a whopping 6,032 minutes wasted. That's 12 whole days of unpaid work. If that doesn't make you wan't to reclaim your lunchbreak we don't know what will...
In fact, their study found that 52% of workers in the UK have revealed they skip their lunch break completely at least once a week, and 37% claim that they rarely leave the office at lunchtime.
Interestingly, despite their stats, over a quarter of people surveyed believed they would be more productive in the afternoon if they left the office at lunch.
The research also indentified the industries and locations where lunch-skipping was most common. Coming in on top was HR where 70% of people bypassed lunch, this was closely followed by banking (68%), and arts and culture (62%).
It won't be a surprise to any Londoners that the capital is the place where people are most likely to work through their hour. This was followed by those in Birmingham, Manchester and Norwich.
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