Workaholic Londoners 'working 11.5 hours unpaid each week'

Londoners are putting in an average of 11-and-a-half hours of unpaid overtime every week, a survey has found.

One in 10 employees is doing a whole extra week of unpaid work on top of their regular office hours, new research by Travelodge shows.

A third of the capital’s workforce are putting in an additional 16 hours per week to stay on top of their workload and keep their boss happy.

The 11-and-a-half hours of unpaid overtime the average worker offers each week would translate to £6,667.70 in extra wages a year if it was on the clock, the survey said.

HR Dept director Fintan O’Toole believes the extra hours worked by Londoners could be partly to do with the nature of jobs located in the capital.

“It is possibly related to the nature of some of the services-related industries such as banking, law and accountancy,” said O’Toole.

“The professions that are here often require as part of the job that work is done through working hours, and other such times which are necessary to complete the job.”

O’TooIe added: “It is probably the profile of the kind of business which is done in the South East rather than Londoners being harder working or more generous with their time to their employers.

“Eleven-and-a-half hours seems quite high and my own view is that we need to generally keep an eye on our work-life balance and try to complete work in the time we are allocated to do it.”

But this culture of all work and no play has taken its toll on the British workforce, with 66% of adults around the country dealing with soaring stress levels on a regular basis. More than a quarter (26%) find it tough to get through the average week.

Four in 10 workers regularly work from home in the evenings, while a third have to do their day job during the weekend to keep their workload manageable.

Fitting in such busy workloads has come at the expense of relaxation time. Almost one in three Londoners say they spend less than six hours relaxing at the weekend, while 65% go into each weekend knowing they will be unable to stop thinking about work.