Singaporeans suffer depressing work-life balance: survey

88% revealed they work beyond official hours.

According to a recent JobStreet.com survey on work-life balance in Singapore, 88% of workers surveyed revealed that they were working beyond their official hours.

Here's more from JobStreet.com:

The main reason cited for working overtime was unreasonable deadlines and overloading of work. Beyond working hours, 70% chose to complete unfinished work in the office while the remaining 30% chose to bring work home.

Only 30% of the respondents claimed that their companies had initiatives in place to promote work-life balance. Flexible work arrangement was identified as the most common initiative practiced by companies.

The survey also revealed a couple of interesting facts:
• 45% indicated that the company pays lip service to work-life balance with policies in place just for show
• 42% indicated that they chose not to use the company’s initiatives for work-life balance with majority citing the concerns of receiving an inferior performance review as the main reason.

On the second point, 74% of employers surveyed were quick to proclaim that they do not view workers who use the company’s work-life balance initiatives as less committed to their jobs.

Workers identified overloading of work and high pressured deadlines as the main reasons for not being able to achieve work-life balance in Singapore.

Said one respondent, “The work-life balance initiatives introduced by companies do not solve the root cause towards why employees can't enjoy work-life balance. Workload is the pertinent issue hence there should be initiatives to ensure realistic allocation of work for each worker or sufficient manpower to sustain the expected workload.”

Concerns about affecting the company’s bottom line as well as employees potentially abusing the system were listed as the main reason. Respondents suggested corporate tax relief and enforcement of policies as steps that the government can take to encourage more companies to promote work-life balance at the workplace.

About 650 workers and 135 employers participated in the survey that was conducted by JobStreet.com in September 2012.

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