Virtual Balance Research

I asked specific questions about gender, age, income and occupation and this survey also identified parents of school-age children.

87% of respondents were women, 13% men. The age-range of people who responded produced an almost perfect "normal" curve as you can see. Most respondents were between 25 and 40.

The split between business owners and employees was very nearly half and half: 48.5% had a business and 51.5% were employees.

In addition to remunerative employment, 60.6% of the respondents were carers, mostly with children at school. Of these, 92% were women. However a note of caution here: as so few men filled in the survey, this is probably not a significant finding.

The annual income range was wide as the graph shows. The median wage in the UK is about £25,000, according to the latest figures (2009). The split of our respondents above and below this figure was about equal, as you would expect, though the number of people earning less than £15,000 seems disproportionate.

This question includes, but is not limited to: going in early or working late at the office, working at home at the weekend, answering phone calls about work when on holiday. This chart is based on all of the responses collected. Almost everyone works some unpaid overtime, regardless of status, salary or sector of the economy.
I have dropped the question about paid overtime which was included in the survey as it did not add anything of value to the result.

Respondents were asked to classify their working hours as:
reasonable ~ long but quite fair ~ somewhat too long ~ long and unfair ~ excessive
Most people thought their hours were reasonable. I have realised I ought to have asked what hours they actually worked to give a little more oomph to this question!

In this chart which includes all responses, approximately two-thirds of people say work/life balance is "very important" or "essential". (Depth of colour indicates range: darkest blue is "essential" going clockwise to "not important")
As the respondents were self-selected and the title of the survey was "Work-Life Balance", it could be argued that only people who felt this way would fill in the survey to begin with.

This is based on the complete dataset. All answers from everyone who responded, so it's a baseline for other sub-sets.
This chart has a simple concept with positive values "above the line" and negative below. This is meant to graphically illustrate the importance assigned to different elements in the lives of the respondents.
The survey included a question about the effect of children on their parents happiness. I am pleased to report that almost all parents responded that this was an "essential" element to their happiness. However, the data was not included because not all the responders were parents and this was distorting the findings.
I was surprised at the low ranking of "sport" overall - I should point out that this survey was done well before the World Cup!

Employees work almost as much unpaid overtime as business owners. The "nine-to-five" culture seems to have gone, with over half of our respondents working extra hours every week.

The overwhelming majority of people think that their working hours are "reasonable" or "fair": employees are more enthusiastic about the hours they work than owners. Is this the result of the European directive on Working Time? Or do people just expect to work longer hours? Plenty of scope for more research on this one.

Employees are keener on work/life balance than business owners. This is perhaps to be expected. Owners will be prepared to sacrifice more of their private life, knowing that they are building up assets for themselves in the future.

Completing a successful project at work was the biggest single source of happiness for employees. More people were made happy by this than by spending time with their significant other or by themselves reading a book! Business owners, though still gaining a great deal of satisfaction from their work, set more store by "me-time", which included reading a book, watching TV or a film.

Not a great deal of difference here. Both men and women work unpaid overtime on a regular basis. Interesting to see that it's the women who work "in a crisis" rather than the men!

The men tended to give more neutral answers to this question. The vast majority of women were happy to say their hours were reasonable or fair, but there were some who thought they were excessive.

Work/life balance is more important to women than to men, which is the intuitive answer most of us would give, I suspect. The men's opinions were very evenly spread throughout the entire spectrum of possible answers, though again I should caution we are talking about a small sample here.

Men get more satisfaction from hobbies and games than women, but apart from that their answers were remarkably similar. "Me-time", "work" and "love" are the top three elements of happiness. Men enjoy spending time with their significant other slightly more than women do - make of that what you will!

Surprisingly, parents or carers work measurably more unpaid overtime than the rest of us. However, it tends to be "occasionally" rather than regularly and some parents are more likely to put their foot down and say "never".

Again, perhaps surprisingly, parents are more likely to think their working hours are "reasonable" or "fair". Family-friendly policies would seem to be working if our respondents are typical!

No surprise here. Parents and carers are much more likely to say that work/life balance is important.

The question about children was removed from this analysis:almost all parents said that their children were essential to their happiness. Apart from their children, parents and carers get more satisfaction out of work than anything else. It's heartening to see that this is only just a little more than the happiness they get from their partner. Family life, it would seem, is alive and well!