Since March 2020, the lines between work and our personal time have become blurred like never before. Whilst the work from home policies made popular by the pandemic have given employees more freedom over their work schedules than ever, it’s also made it much harder for some people to truly switch off and achieve a real life-work balance.
A consistently poor life-work balance can have lasting damage to a company’s culture, resulting in poor job satisfaction levels, high absenteeism, decreased quality of work, and a high employee turnover rate.
To find out which industries offer the best life-work balance, Remote has analyzed 22 different industries, creating an overall ranking based on basic and overtime pay rates, annual incentive pay, the amount of hours worked each week, and employee turnover rates.
The Financial and Insurance Activities Industry Offers the Best Life-Work Balance
Remote’s analysis reveals that the industry offering its employees the best life-work balance is the financial and insurance activities sector. Compared with the rest of the sectors analyzed, this industry has the highest average salary with £62,244 and the best annual incentive pay with £11,843.
Employees working in financial and insurance activities also have the highest basic weekly pay rate at £985.20, working just under 34 hours each week to earn this. Offering financial and insurance professionals such an excellent life-work balance could be the reason why this sector has the lowest employee turnover rate of every industry Remote looked at, with 25%.
Top Five Best Industries For a Healthy Life-Work Balance
| Rank | Industry | Average Salary | Annual Incentive Pay | Weekly Pay (Basic) | Weekly Pay (Overtime) | Weekly Paid Hours (Basic) | Weekly Paid Hours (Overtime) | Employee Turnover |
| 1 | Financial and Insurance Activities | £62,244.00 | £11,843.00 | £985.20 | £5.90 | 33.9 | 0.4 | 25% |
| 2 | Information and Communication | £47,556.00 | £3,734.00 | £870.40 | £5.20 | 35.7 | 0.3 | 44% |
| 3 | Electricity, Gas, Steam, and Air Conditioning Supply | £45,541.00 | £1,680.00 | £854.40 | £41.50 | 36.1 | 1.3 | 67% |
| 4 | Mining and Quarrying | £43,066.00 | – | £808.20 | £53.80 | 39.8 | 3.1 | 54% |
| 5 | Real Estate Activities | £33,355.00 | – | £608.00 | £5.70 | 33.2 | 0.3 | 49% |
Remote’s Senior People Specialist, Keah Nguyen advises employees to help their staff set clear boundaries between work and personal time. Nguyen says: “Remote encourages its employees not to have work apps on their phones and to master the art of working asynchronously. By switching to async workflows, team members can work at the hours that are best for them — and not during hours they would rather be doing something else.”
