No surprise: Work-life imbalance evident across Singapore, Hong Kong

It's a tale as old as time - employers continue to ignore the provision of work-life balance across Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia, while for employees, it has emerged as the number one item on their wishlist, in research by recruitment firm Randstad.

With the preference for work-life balance rising to the highest level in years, employers in all three markets performed so poorly in this aspect that the factor ended close to the bottom of the ranking.

The ranking also revealed that employers scored the highest in financial health and good reputation. While potential employees considered the financial health of the company to be fairly important, good reputation was not much of a priority, featuring nowhere in their top five priorities.

Pleasant work atmosphere was also found to have a gap in expectations between employees and employers. The attractiveness factor ranked fairly highly with employees, however, employers scored poorly in this area – just one position higher than work-life balance.

Michael Smith, managing director, Randstad Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia noted, “It‟s widely known that work-life balance has become highly important for employees of all demographics; our research just reaffirms and measures that attribute."

He added: "The stakes are high for these organisations. By not addressing the evolving wants and needs of employees, they risk losing the very talent that helped them build their strong reputations and financial health."

The research surveyed over 5,000 employees and job-seekers between the ages of 18-65 in Singapore and Hong Kong. In Malaysia, over 4,500 were surveyed.

Photos / Randstad