Research digested: The 2026 Global Trends and Benchmarks Report: How Work Gets Done, Hubstaff

About this research

This report is based on anonymised data from 140,000+ workers across 17,000 organisations globally, including APAC, EMEA, North America, Latin America). Hubstaff tracks focus time, meetings, app/URL activity per day, AI usage and hours worked.

Key findings

Meetings are expanding rapidly
The average person sits in twice as many meetings per year and organisations run nearly six times more than two years ago. Employees now average 25 meetings per month.

Focus time is limited — especially for hybrid teams
Workers spend 39% of tracked time in deep focus (2–3 hours/day). Office teams average 45% focus, remote 41%, hybrid 31%.

Tool overload fragments attention
People use 18 apps per day on average. The report authors link this usage to the effects of switching between apps – research from Harvard Business review suggests this equates to fours a week.

AI adoption is broad but shallow — except hybrid teams
AI adoption in hybrid teams rose from 72% to 84% and time spent using AI increased from 5% to 11%. Remote/office teams spend just 1 to 2% of time in AI apps.

What to act on

The report authors urge employers to treat focus time as a core productivity KPI, tracked by role and workstyle, because average focus is 39%, with hybrid teams at  31%.

Redesign meetings too – the number of meetings is on the rise and employers need to get a grip on what is really needed.  The same goes with digital app/tool usage, which has the unintended consequence if reducing productivity.

AI adoption remains a mixed picture – there is opportunity to build on what is working for the teams that are early adopters.

Read the report: https://hubstaff.com/global-work-report