Work-life balance

On July 1, 2024, Greece introduced a six-day workweek to reduce labour shortages and eradicate unpaid overtime. This law applies to industrial facilities and 24/7 services but it excludes tourism and food services.

While Greece sees this as a positive step, employee relations experts around Europe argue that the long working hours and inadequate rest will affect work-life balance and productivity. This decision is also quite a surprise because other European countries want to implement shorter workweeks.

Finland is known as the world's happiest country. The country has a unique work culture which makes going to work enjoyable! Framery, a Finnish manufacturing company is one of the many companies that builds this work culture by making these five phrases a part of their daily work ethic:

The Atlantic reports that though success isn’t a conventional medical addiction, it has addictive properties for many people. Praise stimulates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is connected to addictive behaviors. Success addiction is known to have a negative effect on human relationships. People choose to travel for business on anniversaries, and they miss their children’s important milestones while working long hours. Some even decide to focus on their careers and forgo marriage.

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), it is possible to be a business leader and still have a personal life with careful planning, but most people wouldn’t know this if they look at some of the most successful CEOs out there. Tesla CEO Elon Musk rarely sleeps or sees his kids and had a public meltdown, and Apple’s Tim Cook is on email before the sun rises.

It’s difficult to be productive when you work at home. Sometimes, you are busy all day and don't make any progress on important work.

Some people tell themselves to “Try harder!” or blame themselves for not achieving enough. Other people work with a long to-do list and try to do many tasks at the same time. But these solutions aren’t helpful.

Instead, you should do this:

According to the Japan Times, the Japanese government plans to encourage firms to allow their employees to choose to work four days a week instead of five, aiming to improve the balance between work and life for people who have family care responsibilities.

The coronavirus pandemic has helped the idea of a four-day workweek gain traction as the health crisis has caused people to spend more time at home.

CNN and multiple other news agencies around the world have reported that Microsoft introduced a program this summer in Japan called the "Work Life Choice Challenge." Microsoft shut down its offices every Friday in August. Managers also urged staff to cut down on the time spent in meetings, suggesting that these last no longer than 30 minutes.

More and more people are feeling both tired and lonely at work. In analyzing the General Social Survey of 2016, close to 50% of people say they are often or always exhausted due to work.

What’s more, there is a significant correlation between feeling lonely and work exhaustion: the more exhausted people are, the lonelier they feel.

In August, an emotional Elon Musk described how he was working so hard to keep production of the Tesla Model 3 on track that he missed his own birthday. Musk had been working 120-hour weeks, often not leaving the factory for three or four days.

Musk has long been celebrated by the business press for his work ethic. His extraordinary schedule—a long working day broken into five-minute increments, so that every second is accounted for—has been reported, approvingly, for some years now.

Japan's lower house on May 31 approved controversial labour reforms that the government has defended as necessary to boost the economy. But, critics warn could result in more death by overwork. The legislation would scrap hourly overtime pay for some employees, while setting overtime caps for others at an annual limit of 360 hours for normal cases, and up to 720 hours for "temporary" and "special" cases. 

The government plans to promote a five-day workweek for construction workers involved in public works projects as part of its work-style reform initiative. Construction workers tend to work more than five days a week because many are under pressure to complete projects faster. Less than 10 percent of construction projects in the country see workers take eight days off over a four-week period.

In most American families led by couples, both parents are in the workforce. At the same time, nearly 1 in 4 U.S. children are being raised by single moms. Yet child care is generally unaffordable and paid leave is not available to most U.S. parents.

The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act in the U.S. did mandate 12 weeks of unpaid job protected leave for some American workers. Yet most families can’t forgo the income that moms bring home.

Many business leaders still believe that time on-task equates to productivity. However, studies have shown that shorter amounts of sleep lead to both lower efficiency and slower completion of basic tasks. That is, sleepy employees are unproductive employees, and they generate fewer and less accurate solutions to problems.

Many people don't understand that when you are not getting enough sleep, you work less productively and thus need to work longer hours to accomplish a goal, creating a negative feedback loop.

Mental health counselors often recommend that clients clean their home environments every day. Dirt and squalor can be symptoms of unhappiness or illness.

But cleanliness is not only about mental health. It is the most basic practice that all forms of Japanese Buddhism have in common. In Japanese Buddhism, it is said that what you must do in the pursuit of your spirituality is clean, clean, clean. This is because the practice of cleaning is powerful.

A purple cape has become an unlikely weapon in Japan's efforts to get its workers to work fewer hours. Employees at a Tokyo-based IT services company were recently forced to wear such "embarrassment" capes if they worked late on the third Wednesday of the month.

While hard work is certainly the key to success, billionaire Richard Branson maintains that there is value in taking time away from the office to unplug and decompress. In a recent blog post, the entrepreneur explains why a three or four day work week can actually be beneficial to the future workforce.

On Wednesday, Melinda Gates joined LinkedIn (now owned by Microsoft) and penned her first column about changing the high-pressure culture.

She writes that in fact technology has made it harder to pull away from our jobs, and easier to wonder whether a night off or a long weekend is damaging our careers.

The result is a work ethic that hurts everyone. When companies demand that employees work themselves into the ground, those that want to balance career with family life lean out. Some of them leave the corporate world altogether, which limits diversity.

Yamato Transport Co. has modified its parcel delivery time slots to reduce the burden on overworked drivers handling a sharp increase in parcels.

As of Monday, the door-to-door parcel delivery firm no longer allows noon to 2 p.m. as a designated delivery time so drivers can take a lunch break.

In addition, the company replaced the latest time slot in the day of 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. with a new slot of 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. to avoid the concentration of delivery orders in the final one hour.

Faced with slack consumption and soul-searching over Japan’s notoriously poor work-life balance, the government is asking companies to allow their workers to leave at 3pm on the last Friday of the month.

The hope is that they will use those extra hours of freedom to shop, make an early start to their Friday libations or go on a weekend break.