Findings from a YouGov for Business in the Community poll has experts cautioning that an ‘always-on’ culture needs to be urgently addressed in order to give employees a healthy work-life balance. Its findings reveal that more than half of the 4,200 employees polled felt obligated to respond to work-related calls and emails outside of office hours.
Further to that, 45% of employees felt as though they are unable to effectively ‘switch-off’ after clocking out. Over the past two years, employees, despite working from home, found it difficult to have a healthy work-life balance with 41% saying they have had to work overtime and struggled to take annual leave due to their workloads.
Workers are also suffering from increased workloads compared to two years ago with more than half (54%) responding that they now had too many priorities or targets compared to 51% in 2020.
Working from home seemingly had a positive influence over employees’ ability to effectively switch off at the end of the day with 49% believing so compared to 45% of employees who were required to go to the office everyday.
As workers suffer from increased workloads and to address the always on culture that has arisen due to boundaries between work and home life blurring, it is crucial that businesses tackle these issues in order to avoid losing talent to their competitors. Giving employees greater flexibility over their working hours, ways of working and even the ability to effectively enforce boundaries when it comes to out of hours communication, are ways to ensure that employees have a healthy balance between work and home.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
