China News Service, Beijing, July 17 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's open access journal "BMC Public Health" recently published a research paper targeting European office workers, showing that working life People who are unbalanced are more likely to complain of poor health.
The paper said that the time available in a day is limited, but the challenges faced by office workers are diverse, including various “deadlines” (task deadlines), financial obligations, and family responsibilities that are difficult to deduce. These problems may cause conflicts between work and life, and have a negative impact on people's work, life and social interaction. And this feeling of not being able to balance work and life may also have adverse health effects.
In order to find out the connection between work-life balance and self-prosecution health status of office workers in Europe, the research team from the University of Bielefeld and Leibniz Institute for Prevention and Epidemiology (BIPS) analyzed the sixth Data from the "European Survey of Working Conditions". Respondents were asked to report their overall health status, how well their working hours fit with family and social obligations outside work, and a general description of their work. The response received came from 32,275 office workers in 30 European countries.
The research team found that people with unbalanced work and life were twice as likely to report their poor health. This association is stronger among women than men, although men are generally more likely to report work-life imbalances. Men report a higher percentage of working hours per week than women, but men are more likely to decide their working hours by themselves, and women usually arrange their work by companies.
Aziz Mensah, the first author of the research paper and PhD student at the University of Bielefeld, said that traditional and social expectations of male and female behaviors are that women are responsible for care and family activities, and men are responsible for making money. This expectation may explain the gender imbalance in work and life. Differences and observed adverse health consequences.
The paper's co-author, Dr. Nicholas Kofi Adjei of the Leibniz Institute for Preventive Research and Epidemiology, pointed out that long working hours, increased psychological input at work, inflexible working hours and role overload can all make employees suffer from working life. conflict. Many countries have inconsistent socioeconomic policies, such as parental leave, support for children and the elderly, and general welfare and equality policies, which may affect the balance between work and family life.
The research paper also compares work-life conflicts and poor health conditions in various regions of Europe and shows that Nordic countries (including Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway) have the highest proportion of self-reported work-life balance (85.6% for men and 86.9% for women). In Southern Europe (including Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus and Malta), office workers have the lowest proportion of self-reported work-life balance (80.99% for men and 76.48% for women).
The research team believes that the results of the research indicate that organizations and policy makers need to provide working conditions and social policies so that adults can cope with the competing needs of work and family activities without subjecting their health to negative effects.
They also reminded that since the work-life balance is assessed by asking the respondent "whether working time is compatible with family or social obligations", it may not be able to cover all the factors that cause work-family imbalance, but this answer can As an important indicator. At the same time, because the survey uses self-reported data, each person's measure of health may also vary from country to country. (Finish)