Does this matter? Well, a few years ago, a survey of employees of one major cement producer found that they were happy with practically every aspect of their employment, apart from their overall work-life balance. Workplace ambiance, travel opportunities, safety, pay, promotion prospects - all fine. It was apparently the number of hours that they were being asked to work each week, contrasting with the number of hours that they had to themselves (for eating socially with friends, for example), that they objected to. What to do?
I know of a company that, when it was in a financial corner during the Great Recession of 2007/8 to 2017/8 (central banks are now unravelling their QE programmes in a new trend, of Quantitative Tightening, or QT), that asked its employees to take a 10% pay cut. They replied that they would, so long as they could also take a 10% cut in time as well. This was the equivalent of half a day a week, or an extra day off per fortnight. The employees were annoyed that they had to take a pay cut, but fairly happy to enjoy a longer weekend every two weeks (and even more satisfied that their job security was stronger through a period of economic uncertainty). When the worst of the crisis was over, the cut in pay was reversed - but the employees had become used to the extra time off. Like coming back to work on the first day after the holidays, it was tough for them to go back to full time work again. It seems that we might all be happier to cut our working hours a little - even if it meant earning a little less (although our spouses might have something to say about this, it’s true). This goes right to the heart of the contradiction between our standard of living and our quality of life.
Our standard of living is defined as the degree of wealth or material comfort that is available to a person or group. We might surround ourselves with the ‘finer things in life’ such as expensive wines, fancy cars and a big house, and we would have a high standard of living (although it’s all relative - there’s no absolute benchmark for a high standard of living and it might contrast between, say, Qatar (average GDP per person US$105,091/yr) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (average GDP per person US$394/yr).2
On the other hand, our quality of life has been summarised as ‘general well-being... including everything from physical health, family, education, employment, wealth, religious beliefs, finance and the environment.’3 I would argue that quality of life also includes intangibles such as your own mental health, your happiness with your own circumstances, your opportunities for leisure and your work-life balance. Even if you work hard - harder than you want to, perhaps - then if you have opportunities for leisure and for regaining balance in your life, then you might still be happy with your quality of life.
For example, I’m anticipating a very busy first half of 2018, but I also have something else to look forward to: I’m organising and participating in the first-ever Irish Sailing and Mountaineering Adventure Challenge (ISAMAC), a sailing and mountain-running race starting in Kinsale, Ireland on 16 June 2018 (search ‘ISAMAC race’ for details). Looking forward to this is going to get me through the cold and dark days of winter, I hope.
At the risk of repeating myself, I’m always startled by the simple methods that we can all take - at low or no cost - to improve our quality of life. Getting a good night’s sleep (for example by not drinking too much tea or coffee - or alcohol), spending less time on screens and social media, spending more time in the outdoors, talking to a friend, sharing a meal, helping someone or volunteering to help others and taking some exercise - they’ve all been shown to powerfully increase our life satisfaction, and they cost nothing.
At the recent Loesche Symposium in Düsseldorf, we had a fantastic ‘Barcamp’ discussion about how to encourage more women to work in the cement industry (where the proportion is probably something like 100 men to each woman). We agreed that apart from sheer strength, women could do everything as well as a man, and some things maybe even better. However, the industry needs to be welcoming and encouraging - to all employees - and providing good workplaces and a good work-life balance would be a fantastic first step.
1 http://natcen.ac.uk/our-research/research/sainsbury’s-living-well-index/
2 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/which-are-the-poorest-countries-in-the-world/
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life
