The poll located on the right side of the blog page was created to see how readers feel about work / life balance. The question was: Do you think U.S. employers should focus on ways to make a healthy work / life balance a possibility for their employees? The available answers and votes are below
- Yes! Times have changed and the U.S. needs to catch up. 91.07% (51 votes)
- No. There’s a reason the U.S. is such a wealthy country. Work, work, work! 0% (0 votes)
- Maybe. Employees should have to earn such benefits with their performance. 8.93% (5 votes)
- Total Votes: 56
Roughly 91% of the voters said yes, and 9% said employees should have to earn such benefits with their performance. Not a single person voted no.
My personal opinion is a mix of the ‘yes’ and the ‘maybe’ answers. While I do think yes, the U.S. is behind the times and needs to catch up, I also think that not all aspects of work / life balance should necessarily be handed to people. If an employee is a poor performer with little to no work ethic, why should they be afforded the same rewards as those who work extremely hard? Then again, it could be argued that perhaps if our work / life balance was better in this country, there would be fewer poor performing employees; it’s another chicken vs egg scenario. There are many companies throughout America that offer perks in their benefits package, but there are countless others who either don’t offer them at all, or do, but the company culture discourages using them. Therein lies the debate: how would we choose what is mandated and what isn’t? This is where the politics come in and things get messy. Basically, some aspects of work / life balance within companies should be considered perks, while other aspects of it should be mandated, such as paid leave. That, of course, is my opinion.
A great source of information that shows how the U.S. compares to the rest of the world in this regard can be found here at the OECD Better Life Index:
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/work-life-balance/
OECD stands for Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. According to their “About” page, their mission is to “promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world” (oecd.org). Their “Better Life Index” is interesting as well – you can measure well-being in your own community. For example, here is the link for California:
https://www.oecdregionalwellbeing.org/US06.html
You can choose just about any area in the world and obtain information about their overall well-being. Nifty!
I implore you to look into this subject sometime if you haven’t done so before – it affects everyone, not just working mothers.
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