Eleven hours a month, on your clock
Most figures in this territory describe the people in difficulty. This one describes everybody, which is what makes it awkward.
AMP’s Financial Wellness Report 2024 asked employees how much time personal financial matters take up during working hours. Across all employees, regardless of stress level, the answer was around eleven hours a month. Roughly a day and a half.
For more than half of them (55%), that time is spent worrying about finances rather than working. Around a fifth (22%) are taking time out to deal with lenders, creditors or collection agencies.
Fieldwork July 2024, n=2,475, post-weighted to ABS statistics. AMP is a financial services provider, so name them when you use the figure.
Why the all-employee base is the interesting part
It would be easy to read this as a statistic about people in trouble. It is not. It is the average across the whole workforce - the untroubled included - which means the figure is being pulled up by a subgroup and still lands at a day and a half a month for the ordinary case.
That reframes what kind of thing this is.
A cost concentrated in a small distressed group is a welfare question, and organisations know how to treat welfare questions. They fund a support service, they measure utilisation, and they move on.
A cost distributed across the entire workforce is an operating condition. It sits in the same category as meeting load or context switching - something that is quietly consuming capacity everywhere, is nobody’s line item, and gets noticed only in aggregate.
Where the time actually goes
Worth separating the two components, because they have different remedies.
The 22% who are dealing with creditors during work hours are doing something visible. It has a start and an end. It is also, in most cases, unavoidable - collections and lenders operate during business hours, which are the same hours their customers are at work. There is no version of this where a person handles it at a convenient time, because no convenient time is offered.
The 55% who are worrying are doing something invisible, and it is the larger group. Nothing is scheduled, nothing appears in a calendar, and nothing is recorded. From the outside it looks like a person at a desk. From the inside it is attention pointed somewhere else.
Which of those two is more expensive depends entirely on what the person’s job requires of their attention, and that is not a wellbeing question. It is a role-design question.
Two things this figure is not
It is not evidence of how much output is lost. Time occupied and productivity lost are different measures with different bases, and the register I work from keeps them deliberately apart. Eleven hours a month is time spent dealing with financial matters at work. It is not eleven hours of lost work, and presenting it that way overstates it in a way that will be picked apart by the first person who checks.
And it is not something to police. The instinct to treat this as a time-theft problem is both wrong and counterproductive. Nobody is choosing to spend a day and a half a month on this. Nobody enjoys ringing a creditor from the car park. Tightening the rules around personal calls does not remove the underlying condition, it just moves the behaviour somewhere less visible and adds concealment to the load the person is already carrying.
What it is useful for
One thing, and it is the reason the figure earns its place.
It gives you a denominator.
Most arguments in this territory founder because they concern a group nobody can size. This figure is different - it applies to the whole workforce, so it multiplies cleanly by your own headcount and produces a number you can put in front of somebody who thinks in dollars.
That calculation is worth doing before you present anything else, because it changes the character of the conversation. It stops being a question about how many of your people are struggling, which nobody can answer, and becomes a question about what is already coming out of your operating capacity every month, which is answerable now with figures you already hold.
Put your own numbers against it
The Missing Line Item is a ten-minute worksheet that produces a defensible dollar figure for what financial pressure is costing your organisation. Your headcount, your own figures, published Australian research for the parts you cannot see. Every source dated. No email required.
