How the UK is losing the work/life balance battle
With Elon Musk’s famously punishing work schedule coming under scrutiny, we asked how British people feel about their own work/life balance — and the results aren’t pretty…
Tesla founder Elon Musk recently missed his own birthday because he was working so hard — but what does that mean for the rest of us?
We carried out a snap survey of over 400 people across the UK about how they balance their work and their personal life — and found that almost 4 in 5 (77%) of us said the UK doesn’t have a good work/life balance. This is why:
Work is making us sick
Around 1 in 2 people (45%) in the UK say that their job has a negative impact on their mental and physical health — an astonishing stat in the context of the overall workforce.
Worse though is what happens next. Overall, 4 in 5 people say they’ve not gone in to work because of feeling physically unwell — an unsurprising proportion.
However, almost the exact same proportion of people (79%) say they feel guilty for calling in sick when they are actually unwell — showing the tight grip that the workplace has on our psyche.
Work is making us work (out of hours)
We also found that work pre-occupies us too much — especially when we have to do too much of it. Almost 3 in 4 (74%) of our bees said that working overtime shouldn’t be the norm.
Despite that, 50% say they often have to work overtime, while 36% are regularly on call outside of work hours.
The real kicker, though, is that much of this work is unpaid. Of those who work overtime regularly, 2 in 3 say they do this without any compensation at all.
We don’t like our work — but we take it home with us
Only 16% of our bees agreed with the statement that ‘My job is the most important thing in my life’.
However, 2 in 3 (64%) said they find it hard to disconnect from work after leaving the office for the day — likely contributing to the mental and physical health problems they feel.
Can we stop taking our problems home with us — or is the UK too far gone to get its work/life balance back?
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A quick word on our methodology: The figures in the article are taken from Streetbees community of members in the UK, carried out in August 2018. All of the data was collected by mobile and web surveys, and is accurate to within 5 percentage points 19 times out of 20.
