Work–life balance

About: Work–life balance is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2252 publications have been published within this topic receiving 36240 citations. The topic is also known as: Work Life balance & work-life balance.

The Fallacy of Chasing after Work-Life Balance

Abstract: As a pediatric intensivist and clinicianscientist, finding a balance between work and life is essential to my professional success and my personal happiness. Failure to achieve a healthy balance will result in burn-out. So I was warned all these years since the first day of medical school. In 2013, 180 articles documented that physicians are highly dissatisfied with their jobs. This is a testament to how poorly we are balancing work and life (1–4). Interestingly, to my best knowledge, to date only 12 articles have been published specifically addressing work-life balance in Pediatrics (5–16). Since entering medical school over two decades ago, I reached the conclusion that the concept of work-life balance acts as quicksand in our professional and personal lives resulting in slow drowning in frustration, depression, and exhaustion. The harder we fight the deeper and quicker we sink. Why are we taught to strive for work-life balance in the first place? The entire future of our modern “24/7” society appears to revolve around mastering this concept, with the ultimate promise that – once achieved – we will all be compensated for the misery and sacrifices that we endured along the way. Astoundingly, a recent study reported an almost 20% higher job dissatisfaction rate for physicians than for the general US population (17). In reality, the concept of work-life balance is imposed upon us by corporations, companies, and employers with the primary intent to maximize our productivity margins at the work place, not to improve our emotional or physical well-being. The cold truth is that all corporations are specifically designed to maximize their financial profit, not the happiness or well-being of their employes. For this vitally important reason, we can under no circumstances leave it to our employers to determine the quality of our own lives (18). To maintain intellectual autonomy as individuals, the task of creating our own happiness has to remain in our own hands. Some employers offer a free smartphone, a tabloid, free daycare, or other after-hour programs as part of their “benefits” package, but in reality they just provided us with the means to spend even more time at work or doing work for them. The new buzz-word in Medicine is“flextime” (19, 20). Besides the fact that for some medical specialties, such as Intensive Care, flextime is a less viable concept than for other specialties, the fact still remains that if my time is flexible somebody has to work the hours that I find inconvenient. This rarely results in two happy employes. Residents and fellows are now restricted to 80 work hours per week (21) and after subtracting even as little as 6 h of sleep per night, they are left with 46 h per week to fill with “life.” Therefore, medical trainees have at best half as many hours available for leisure as they are required to spend at work. Clearly, achieving a work-life balance under these conditions is extremely unlikely, probably even impossible. Importantly, despite work hour restrictions physicians’ dissatisfaction with both their jobs and lives is actually at an all-time high and rising (22, 23). One can argue that residency and fellowship are only temporary occupations but in reality I do not remember working any less in medical school or now as an attending. The increased amount of responsibilities assigned to a physician once out-of-training actually accentuates rather than diminishes our daily stress level and results in further spillover of work-time into leisure-time. As we follow our peers’ instructions trying to balance work and life, the question arises: when should we achieve this balance and How do we know we achieved it? Since most of us enter the workforce as teenagers, would our high school or medical school years be a good time to start embracing this concept? Our early professional career years? At mid-career level? After retirement? While common sense tells us that the pursuit of work-life balance should occur during all stages of our careers, we all have a tendency to constantly postpone any significant improvement in our daily quality of life until after the current project is completed, after this service week, after the next promotion, after the kids are out of the house. Just how poorly we balance our work and life throughout our careers was highlighted in a recent study showing that early career physicians had the lowest satisfaction rate with their overall career choice, and mid-career physicians reported the lowest satisfaction rate with their specialty choice and their work-life balance (24). Alarmingly, similar job dissatisfaction rates have been reported for medical students and interns (25). Particularly, the high institutional demands for the new generation of clinician-scientists, which are deeply rooted in our professional culture, add further barriers to a healthy work-life balance (26). Clinicianscientists face additional challenges dealing not only with the separation between work and life but also between clinical care and research. A key reason for early career physicians to leave academic medicine is in fact the disconnection between their own priorities and those of the dominant culture of academic medicine (27). It is obvious that as physicians we are facing tremendous struggles throughout all career stages in implementing what would

Attitudes towards attrition among UK trainees in obstetrics and gynaecology.

Abstract: Physician dissatisfaction in the workplace has consequences for patient safety. Currently in the UK, 1 in 5 doctors who enter specialist training in obstetrics and gynaecology leave the programme before completion. Trainee attrition has implications for workforce planning, organization of health-care services and patient care. The authors conducted a survey of current trainees' and former trainees' views concerning attrition and ‘peri-attrition’ – a term coined to describe the trainee who has seriously considered leaving the specialty. The authors identified six key themes which describe trainees' feelings about attrition in obstetrics and gynaecology: morale and undermining; training processes and paperwork; support and supervision; work–life balance and realities of life; NHS environment; and job satisfaction. This article discusses themes of an under-resourced health service, bullying, lack of work–life balance and poor personal support.

Work-life integration in neuropsychology: a review of the existing literature and preliminary recommendations.

Abstract: Objective: The purpose of the current review paper is to identify and describe challenges to work–life integration in neuropsychology, and from this review extrapolate an initial set of recommendat...

Putting balance into business: Work/life balance as a business strategy for avoiding brain drain

Abstract: Recruiting and retaining highly skilled staff is a challenge facing all types and sizes of organizations in the 21st century. It requires taking a strategic approach to the attraction, selection, development and retention of employees, in order to meet staff, business and societal needs. Work/life balance consultant Hayley Dunne explains how introducing work/life balance initiatives can help organizations to achieve this.

Working Time Patterns for Sustainable Work

Abstract: Excerpt] Working time is a recurrent topic of study because the nature of work, its content, the conditions under which it is performed and the labour market itself keep changing. These changes have an impact on working time duration and the way working time is organised. One of the manifest results is the erosion of a clear demarcation between working time and non-working time – the work and private sphere. The European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) is among the sources that have clearly established the link between working time patterns and the health and wellbeing of workers. Eurofound’s research on job quality shows that working time quality is one of the crucial contributing elements. ]This report examines working time patterns in more detail. It provides an overview of the recent evolution of working time duration and organisation in the EU and highlights the most important trends and differences between Member States. Through an in-depth analysis of data from the sixth EWCS (2015), it also examines, from a gender and life course perspective, the links between working time patterns, work–life balance and working time preferences on the one hand and workers’ health and well-being, on the other. Finally, it explores the implications of working time patterns for the longterm sustainability of work.