Promoting Work-Life Balance in Workplaces Pays Off
(Tuesday August 14th, 2007)

And for good reason - one estimate by the Conference Board of Canada places the cost of a lack of work/life balance at $12 billion each year.

Improving work life balance will improve the success of the business in several critical ways. According to the Conference Board of Canada, workers who reported a high degree of stress balancing their work and family life missed 7.2 days of work each year, while those who reported very little stress only missed an average of 3.6 days.

Furthermore, Statistics Canada found that employees who considered most of their days to be quite a bit or extremely stressful were over 3 times more likely to suffer a major depressive episode, compared with those who reported low levels of general stress.
The cost to employers when staff experience serious mental illness is significant. Disability costs can be up to 12% of a business's overall payroll cost, and mental health claims are the fastest growing category of all disability costs.
With this in mind, it's not surprising that a US study conducted by Metlife, found that more than half of today's employees rate work-life balance as a key job selection criterion. This is particularly true of workers between the ages of 21 and 30, who rank work/life balance ahead of financial growth and advancement.

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