Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is the most important work-related benefit to those who responded to a question about how important that sense of personal equilibrium was when compared to similar benefits of a working life such as compensation, advancement, and stability.
34% of respondents said that a sense of work-life balance was the most important professional benefit at this stage of their career, with another 28% answering that it was the 2nd most important to them. Just a tiny percentage (3%) rated it least important. This info comes from the latest reading of an ongoing study by Comparably. More than 5,000 people responded to the query.
Answers were very similar when broken down by gender.
Age Is a Factor
Respondents aged 18-25 were the least resoundingly enthusiastic with their answers, rating work-life balance both “the most important” and “2nd most important” at 29%. However, the most popular answer for that age group was “equal to others” (meaning equal to other beneits of working) at 30%.
18-25
By 31-35, respondents ranked their work-life balance as “most important” (32%) and “2nd most important” (32%), with “equal to other” dropping down to 26%, implying that a few years’ exposure to “the real world” tends to reorder workers’ expectations.
31-35
However, by the 45-50 bracket, work-life balance had dropped down to “2nd most important” by a 3% margin over “most important,” perhaps suggesting that the terminology itself hasn’t taken root as strongly with workers who have been in the workplace for multiple decades.
46-50
So Is Experience
Respondents who had already worked for between 1-3 years, despite the presumed overlap with the age 18-25 bracket, voted strongly for work-life balance as “the most important,” but they chose “equal to others” by a 9% margin over “2nd most important.”
1-3 years
The latest reading is as of Jan. 6.
