Flexibility in the workplace is essential to maintaining a work/life balance; but how many U.S. employees are actually succeeding at this balance? Mercer, a consulting, outsourcing and investments company, released an infographic based on the results of its What’s Working survey. The survey looked at 2,400 U.S. employees’ views on work.
“Most likely as a result of some fairly dramatic, economy-driven changes in the workplace in recent years, fewer U.S. workers today say their workloads are reasonable,” says Burce Barge, Partner in Mercer’s Human Capital business. “But despite this, more workers say they can achieve work/life balance.”
“We also found that work/life balance ranks as one of the top factors influencing employee motivation and engagement in the U.S.,” says Barge. “Employees are willing to work hard, but they also want work arrangements to reflect and accommodate their personal lives.”
What Barge says proves the point that, in the workplace, flexibility is critical (see 3 Benefits Of Flexibility In The Workplace And 5 Ways To Make It Work For You).
The Mercer What’s Working survey found three main results:
1. Men are more out of balance
More women than men claim they can maintain a healthy balance between their work and personal lives; this is surprising, given the assumption that women are the “homemakers” or are primarily in charge of children, thus have more balancing difficulties.
2. Workloads are heavier
While the majority of workers still claim their workload is reasonable, the amount is down 5% from five years ago. Are workloads increasing, or is there some other variable in this finding?
3. Workers are fans of flexibility
I’ll say it again: flexibility rocks. Women and younger workers view flexibility as very important to their levels of motivation and engagement. But, only three in five US workers have flexibility at work (not too shabby, but it could be higher).
What do you think of the current workloads and flexibility US workers are experiencing? How important is flexibility to you?
