Americans Are Most Confident in Their Work, But Are They the Most Productive in the World?

Staff Writer. Covers leadership, media, technology and culture.

March 29, 2016 2 min read

Americans are often considered to be a pretty confident bunch -- and that isn’t always a compliment. But that stereotype proved itself to have a fair amount of truth to it in the findings of a recent global poll about work/life balance and job satisfaction.

Of the countries surveyed in the 2016 Global Attitudes Toward Work Report conducted by software-as-a-service firm Qualtrics, employees in the U.S. were the most likely to rate their personal day-to-day productivity much higher than what they thought of other Americans workers' productivity -- 68 percent compared to 57 percent.

In terms of efficiency, Germans reported that more than 72 percent of their hours spent working were productive, while at the lower end of the spectrum Italians said that only 48.5 percent of their time at the office was productive.

And while spending time on social media is a pretty universal mode of procrastination, it turns out that Greek employees used it the most, with an average of 24 minutes a day, and Americans used it the least, clocking in at 14 minutes.

Sixty eight percent of employees in both the U.S. and France said that they were moderately or extremely satisfied with their work/life balance, while at the low end, only 36 percent of Greek workers reported feeling “extremely” or “moderately” satisfied with theirs.

As for job satisfaction, the U.S., France and Germany were at the top of the list with Poland bringing up the rear with less than 43 percent reporting that they were happy with their current gigs.

With regard to issues such as getting to the office on time, perhaps it’s not a shock that punctuality is a top priority to German respondents, and less so to Americans -- only a little more than half think it's important.

The study gathered the responses of 6,250 workers from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.