Work, Life Balance
The 21st century has placed increasing time demands on people in both the personal and professional parts of their lives.
Whether it's professional workload demands, hours of work, child care, elder care or relationship pressures, finding a balance is at best daunting. Finding the balance that looks after our own mental health, our families and friends and our jobs has become a major undertaking.
Until very recently work-life balance was viewed as the individual employee's responsibility, not the employer's. That is, not until the costs of chronically problematic work-life balance began showing up on organizational bottom lines and employee's work engagement surveys and exit interviews.
The most disturbing way it showed up was an increase in mental health problems associated with employees. In North America, mental health concerns are now the largest reason for short and long-term disability claims. Of these mental health claims, fully three-quarters are for clinical depression. Clinical depression, although highly treatable, is one of the most under-diagnosed illnesses. The Canadian Medical Association states that the chances of a clinically depressed patient being correctly diagnosed by their own GP are one in three. To correct this under-diagnosis, the CMA has recently sent out six questions that they want all family practitioners to ask their patients.
Related Newsletter:
The following article outlines this work life balance conundrum.
