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&nbsp;egal professionals in SA spend more hours at their jobs during a typical workday than their international counterparts do.
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 <td style="font-size: 12px; text-decoration: none; ">SANCHIA TEMKIN</td>
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 <div class="Published" style="font-size: 10px; ">Published:&nbsp;2010/10/21 06:49:40 AM</div>
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LEGAL professionals in SA spend more hours at their jobs during a typical workday than their international counterparts do, according to the findings of a study issued yesterday by LexisNexis, a provider of content-enabled workflow solutions designed for professionals.
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South African legal professionals spend on average 9,5 hours of their day in the office, compared to their counterparts in the US who spend 8,8 hours, the UK (7,8 hours), China (8 hours) and Australia (7,9 hours).
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The study, carried out between June and July, included 1700 professionals from five countries.
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Productivity, which is being demanded from a shrinking workforce during the recession, is affected by employees&rsquo; access to information, several recent studies have found.
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The LexisNexis research included 300 nonlegal professionals and 200 legal professionals in the US and 200 nonlegal professionals and 100 legal professionals in each of the other markets included in the study.
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It found six in 10 South African workers reported that since the economic downturn, the amount of information they have had to process at work had fallen significantly.
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Furthermore, nine in 10 South African professionals agreed that not being able to access the right information at the right time was a huge waste of time.
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The productivity of 25% of South African professionals was negatively affected because they did not have consistent internet access at work.
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A significant percentage of professionals experienced feelings of dejection and frustration with the constant flood of information and believed they would soon reach a breaking point where they couldn&rsquo;t handle any more information.
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Kevin Laithwaite, MD of interactive talent management portal JobCrystal, said: &ldquo;This trend is clearly not going to decelerate.&rdquo;
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Mr Laithwaite said e-mail was proving to be a continuous stream of interruption for employees.
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&ldquo;The happiest and most satisfied employees are senior management because they know how to deal with stressful matters in the workplace.&rdquo;
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In terms of job function, people in design, legal work, manufacturing, retail, sales, business and transportation were the most miserable employees, according to a recent study carried out by JobCrystal.
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Mr Laithwaite said professionals tended to be reactive in their work environments, which only added to their stress level.
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Most workers (67%) who took part in the LexisNexis study admitted that the quality of their work suffered at times because they couldn&rsquo;t sort through the information they needed fast enough.
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Lawyers, in particular, reported that research tended to take up so much of their time that sometimes they ended up not billing for the time they had spent on work.
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Billy Last, CEO of LexisNexis SA, said businesses globally were demanding sophisticated online research tools capable of searching, sifting and filtering information.
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temkins@bdfm.co.za
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