Originally published in WealthManagement.com
The financial services industry has made some meaningful strides toward managing employee burnout. According to ActivTrak’s 2025 State of the Workplace Report, 74% of financial services workers maintain healthy work patterns, which is four percentage points higher than in other industries. Further, just 7% of workers in the industry are at risk of burnout, down 30% since 2023.
Yet, the industry still has work to do, said Gabriela Mauch, chief customer officer and head of ActivTrak’s Productivity Lab. Financial services has the second-longest workday, at an average of 9 hours and 7 minutes—23 minutes longer than the cross-industry average.
In addition, the industry has the highest percentage of employees working weekends, at 9%, nearly double the cross-industry average of 5%. Employees work an average of 4 hours and 16 minutes on Saturdays and 4 hours and 27 minutes on Sundays. For those working both days, they’re working an average of 4 hours and 32 minutes.
“Typically, when I see weekend work, what I like to see from a health perspective is this notion that, sure, there’s weekend work, but they’re not working as long during the weekday and there’s more schedule fluidity,” Mauch said. “What’s happening in the financial services industry—it appears as though the workdays are long and the weekend work persists, which just gives a bit of a pause, for what does that burnout situation look like? Are there appropriate boundaries around the workday?”
While burnout has decreased year over year, 11% of employees are still overutilized, a worrisome number to Mauch. Overutilization is defined by how the company intentionally sets a goal or target for productive hours, with anything above that 30% threshold of that target being overutilized.
In the financial services industry, workers are utilized seven days a week, so they’re in a position to work far more than expected.
On the other hand, the report found that 16% of employees are underutilized, which is causing a bell curve.
“You’ve got what I would call some level of organizational drag that’s happening,” Mauch said. “You’ve got people who are coming along in the organization and riding the coattails of others. And then those others are on the other side of that bell curve, which are the overutilized population.”
“My challenge to the financial services companies is, what organizational design work are you doing to look at data like this and say, ‘Where can we allocate some of the work on those people that are burning out onto the people that are underutilized?’ In some cases, there exist opportunities to rebalance that workload. Or, step further back and say, ‘Where do we need to train on skills and competencies so that those people can absorb some of that work?’”
Some of the most common reasons Mauch has observed for underutilization include employees who are misaligned with their work, lack of clear direction, lack of excitement about their work and lack of skillsets to do what they’re being asked to do.
Despite the levels of over- and under-utilization, the financial services industry ranked third in daily productive time, at 6 hours 32 minutes, 15 minutes higher than the cross-industry average. The industry has 95% productivity efficiency, up about 1% year over year, and it ranked fifth in productive session time, with an average of 25 minutes and 35 seconds.
ActivTrak’s State of the Workplace report is based on three years of anonymized customer data, including 218,900 employees across 777 companies. The financial services data set includes companies involved in monetary transactions, wealth management and financial advisory services. It covers 13,806 employees across 95 companies.
