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How is work-life balance measured? Is this self-reported data? What does the percentage mean?
From their website:
“”" Life-work balance is an evolving definition, describing how we juggle our personal lives alongside the demands of our careers. Remote has coined the term to describe the increasing trend of people putting life first and work second.
Strong life-work balance extends beyond the ability to work from home. Measuring life-work balance with accuracy considers a number of the most important impacting factors ranging from payment rate to inclusivity. Putting Europe to the test, we conducted an index data analysis to reveal the top countries to live and work across the old continent. Would you consider a move abroad in search of a greater balance between your personal life and career?
The European Life-Work Balance Index assesses focuses on the countries situated in Europe, ranking the quality of life-work balance across each nation. The index considers a variety of vital factors including:
Healthcare Minimum wage Maternity leave Statutory annual leave Sick pay Overall happiness levels Average working hours LGBTQ+ inclusivity“”"
Kind of arbitrary set of data to be calling a work life balance index, but what do I know…
My German roomie would get a kick out of Sweden and Germany being side by side. Anecdotal of course but I don’t think he’d agree.
For starters, he hasn’t been almost killed at his job here in Sweden, even though truck driver is probably a more dangerous job than his old office job. No flying saw blades here.
Germans are notoriously grumpy so we’ll always be at the bottom at anything that tries to measure happiness.
To be fair though, Germany seems like a miserable place to work. Outdated tech, weird social hierarchies, expected overtime, free labour by exploiting students.
Your experience in Germany doesn’t really seem typical. And social hierarchies will appear weird in any foreign country.
He’s definitely right about the overtime and students.
Anywhere that has a union is not expecting overtime. In fact it is counted and you can take the time off that you accumulated.
The only time i ever got overtime back as holiday leave was in Germany. That was great!
I think I had something stupid like 43 days off that year (including the base 6-weeks)
That’s standard here in Sweden.
What isn’t standard is forcing students to work extra. There are also limits on how much time certain professions can work, mostly for safety reasons. If you work as a trucker you are only allowed to drive for so many hours before forcing a break, and only so many hours in the span of 24 hours and a week.
As far as I know, Germany has a decent set of labour laws but the follow up on infractions is scarce.
I’ve a friend that works 60-80 hours a week while juggling his uni degree. The work is part of it as far as I understand. Thus his pay is also not in accordance with the role he has. In short, exploitation.
Sure I’d rather live and work in Germany any day, but if given the option, I’d not leave Sweden.
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Sure, LGBTQ+ inclusivity is good. But is it at all related to work-life balance?
Having looked at this, they have a few things that aren’t quite right. But that’s not surprising given how tough it is to compare countries that define things differently.
I’ve only lived recently in Germany and the UK, so I can speak for those, but for example the “maternity” comparison is very skewed because of the (admittedly confusing) way that Germany defines “paid time with your child after they are born”. There are basically two phases to it, with different names and conditions. The first is the 14 weeks of 100% pay which is listed on the website, but afterwards there is what’s called Elternzeit (“parents time”) which is partially paid (starts at 65% if I remember right) and is at least 14 months, but can be extended with slightly different conditions.
So the vast majority of the benefit is not being included in this comparison.
- Google the source
- click at the first finding
- scroll down to Methodology
https://remote.com/resources/research/european-life-work-balance-index
Edit:
What indicators would be better suiting? Working hours and work-life balance sounds quite suiting.
So much sass. Lol
The UK being that high makes me feel very sorry for everyone in the countries ranked lower
Yeah, we moved from Germany to the UK a year or so ago and are about to move back pretty much specifically because of this.
Maybe it’s just London, but here there is a really prevalent “hustle culture” and everyone is doing things like joining work calls during their holidays or not having a lunch break and then working 9 hours anyways.
Not to mention you get less holidays and things like being sick or maternity leave are terrible headaches in comparison.
So all in all, for us at least its been a shock! Ib would be interested to know what metrics they are using for work-life balance, because it likely doesn’t match what I would choose.
It’s weird tho, because Austria is ranked way lower, but in my experience it ain’t that bad
I think the problem is that it’s difficult to think of this on a country-by-country basis. I’m in the UK. One of my friends works for a hedge fund in London and has an appalling work-life balance, long hours, little opportunity to work-from-home. Another works for a charity based in London while working-from-home in a regional city for all but one day of the month, and works reasonable hours and gets every other Friday off. My own experience is somewhere in the middle. The difference between our individual experiences in the UK will dwarf the differences between the UK and another European country.
I can completely believe that your own relative experiences of Austria and the UK could be very different to what’s shown in the diagram because work-life balance is so much more dependent on what line of work you’re in, who your employer is, what stage you’re at in your career, etc. Except in extreme cases, these things will count for more than national differences.
Another reason it can be tough is that certain metrics are defined differently between counties.
Many metrics will list the UK a having one of the highest holiday allowances in Europe since legally full-time workers are entitles to 28 days off, however the UK includes Bank Holidays (8-9 days) in this total. For comparison, a country like Austria has a minimum of 5 weeks holiday (25 days) but this is IN ADDITION TO state holidays (of which there are 13, but some will be on weekends so the absolute amount varies year to year). Centrally this end up with everyone in Austria having something like 33-34 days off.
I’ve yet to see a list that accounts for this, so most have the UK right near the top. I would bet that this metric is no different.
You make an interesting point that is often true in general. That within differences are bigger than between differences.
Having worked in the Netherlands, UK, and Germany my 2 cents is that this rings untrue to my industry.
but did you work in any of the bottom range countries? to compare
Italy and Ireland. However the point I fluffed making is that W/L Balance in the UK is much lower.
I can confirm this. I worked in England, Italy, Switzerland and Germany (Operations/Logistics) and I refuse to believe that England/UK is that high up. Italys placement I do believe however.
cheers. Would you say Italy is at the right place?
Honestly I’m inclined not to, I feel it should be higher, but maybe that’s industry specific. Whenever I was there it was relaxed to the point of being very difficult to accomplish anything. There is likely a big difference though in areas.
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Afaik, people don’t live in Luxemburg. The city appears to be busy during the day and almost empty at night since most people working there, actually live abroad in Germany or Belgium.
UK is included but not Switzerland?
Bc Switzerland is worse than Romania
That’s not a reason
This picture is not very truthful I believe.
Norway has the coolest country shape though, like a guitarr.
Akshually, it’s a giraffe with a leather jacket and a mohawk.
Yeah! The designer got an award for the shape, especially for the fjords.
Poland seems very off to me, given I always thought it was weird people leaving work at 3pm to get their kids from school. Every single day. And people call it normal.
Also 1 year of maternity leave. Which is incredibly cool.
France better than the Netherlands? Czechia so low? I don’t buy it
I’m surprised to see the UK significantly ahead of Sweden.
Yeah me too. Makes me question their metric. Maybe something like Sweden not having an official minimum wage, even though that is regulated through other means (very strong unions).
Spain? Wtf I’m shocked 😮
If you’re not working the balance is pretty good /s kind of
I have no idea how they measure their work-life balance index, but IIRC Spain still has a limited degree of the siesta showing up in places. Like, my understanding is that your random office in Madrid wouldn’t do it, but in a town back in the backcountry may have businesses that do so.
googles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta
In modern Spain, the midday nap during the working week has largely been abandoned among the adult working population.[16] According to a 2009 survey, 16.2 percent of Spaniards polled claimed to take a nap “daily”, whereas 22 percent did so “sometimes”, 3.2 percent “weekends only” and the remainder, 58.6 percent, “never”. The share of those who claimed to have a nap daily had diminished by 7 percent compared to a previous poll in 1998. Nearly three out of four siesta-takers claimed to take siestas on the sofa rather than the bed.
English-language media often conflates the siesta with the two to three hour lunch break that is characteristic of Spanish working hours,[18] even though the working population is less likely to have time for a siesta and the two events are not necessarily connected. In fact, the average Spaniard works longer hours than almost all their European counterparts (typically 11-hour days, from 9 am to 8 pm).
Huh.
Yeah, It depends on which sector you are focusing.
The office sector normally has an 8-hour workday, from 8am to 5pm with a mandatory hour for lunch or similar. Other offices may have a 7 to 3pm with no time for lunch, like in the Banking or Public sector.
But, in the countryside people that work on farms and greenhouses normally work more than that, although, that is a minimal percentage of the population.
In hot areas of the country, like the south or the spanish plateau is imposible and dangerous to work at midday on open fields, because of UV radiation and high temperatures, so normally they stop working and return home to eat, rest and go back to work later when the UV hazard has decreased. Those people are the ones that tipically have siestas, because of the long hours during the day 7am to 8pm and the physical effort that they need to perform in the workours.
I’m from Spain and I don’t get how it’s that high. For my industry it is possibly true but lower paying jobs (which Spain has a lot) are very bad. People working 9 to 20 with a long lunch break is very common and it’s quite a horrible schedule…
I think some countries are missing here.
I think some countries are missing here.
I’d guess that they’re using Eurostat data, but the UK is present, and they stopped participating in Eurostat when they left the EU. So either it’s not that, or it’s old data.
A bit off-topic, but I kind of wish that the UK and some of the other countries in Europe could participate in some level of voluntary, best-effort participating to share data. Like, okay, if you’re not in the EU, you aren’t bound to use the same statistical standards that EU members are, but I am pretty sure that some countries do or don’t care, and it’s kind of obnoxious that it makes it harder to compare datasets spanning all of Europe.
How is this always a comment? Of course, there are a lot more countries in Europe and the world. I suggest you search for a CSV file and create your own diagram. :)
Or one has to deal with the fact that not every picture includes everything.
Enjoy the data. 🍺
Because you’re biasing the diagram by deliberately excluding data. You could have excluded the best. Or the worst. Or some in between so two look close together but aren’t. Or it could look more uniform than it really is. Excluding data and not being transparent and upfront with is, is skewing things.
Excluding the US in a chart subtitled “European life-work balance” is bad, noted
At what point did they ask about the US?
Do I need to precise that my post was a /s ? It was ! Actually already 2 comments are saying that US is missing, so I joked about it and about the fact some said this is biased because countries are missing
Actually there is all the source given in the picture itself, if a country is missing, maybe check the data before complaining about people hiding things to you; maybe the data itself does not exists for the country you think is missing
Oh god… of course that’s the goal.
The life-work-bias!
Your intention doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t change the fact that the visualization is intransparent.
It’s not even all EU members.
Just state what you are showing. That’s all we’re asking.
Something like All european countries with a population > x
Something like All european countries with a population > x
Even that isn’t quite it. I mean, Russia’s got the largest population in Europe, and it’s not in there. Turkey is the second-most-populous country with territory in Europe, though the bulk of that is outside Europe. Ukraine’s not in there.
It’s like “some but not all of the EU plus some other countries in Europe, like Serbia and the UK”. They’ve got Estonia and Latvia, but not Lithuania, which isn’t something that I’d expect to see too often.
This is hilarious.
Holy shit you’re insufferable.
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Initially I was like “wow America sucks so much we didn’t even make the list”. Then I read the rest of the image. Then I noticed the name of this community. I’m still just going to assume we wouldnt make the list anyway
Switzerland should be on there tho
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Hey?! Where’s Merica? Freedom land with the 2nd most incarcerated
Did they somehow manage to join europe or do i miss something here?
I mean oil has already been discovered in Europe, so the possibility is pretty high.
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