Work & Balance

Do you think people work longer hours now than in the past? Measured hours have actually fallen over the past century in most countries. What's changed is the boundary — technology has made workers continuously reachable, and the expectation of responding outside working hours has become embedded in many workplace cultures. So the numbers might look similar, but the psychological experience of being "at work" has extended into evenings and weekends in a way that's genuinely new. How important is it for companies to allow flexible working? Very, for two practical reasons. Retention: people who can structure their hours around their actual lives are less likely to leave or chronically underperform. And competition: companies that don't offer flexibility lose candidates to those that do, especially in roles where people have options. The objection that flexibility hurts collaboration is real but largely solvable through deliberate coordination practices rather than requiring everyone in the same place at the same time. Will most jobs be done from home in the future? No, and the pandemic data is instructive. Even at the peak of enforced remote work, large categories of employment were entirely on-site: healthcare, logistics, construction, retail, education. Those sectors employ the majority of workers globally. Remote work has established itself as a durable option for a particular slice of knowledge work — the assumption that it would generalise broadly has proven overstated. Has the balance between work and personal life improved recently? In some ways yes, in others no. Formal protections have improved — more statutory leave, more parental rights, more legal limits on hours. But the cultural expectation of availability, enabled by technology, has worked against those gains. The floor has risen — very poor conditions are less common — but genuine psychological separation from work has probably become harder even for people with technically good conditions. What role should governments play in protecting workers' right to rest? A real one, because market pressure alone tends to produce overwork when employers have more leverage than employees. Right-to-disconnect legislation in parts of Europe — limiting employers' ability to expect responses outside working hours — is a reasonable example. Without it, individual workers who try to set limits risk disadvantaging themselves even if everyone would collectively benefit from the norm. That's exactly when regulation makes sense.