Top work-life balance benefits for 2023

“Flexibility is the gold standard of work-life balance benefits,” says Jonathan Pas, health care leader at consulting firm Mercer.

It’s no surprise then that two years after the pandemic forced most office workers to perform their jobs remotely. 78% of employers say they’ll allow employees to continue doing so regularly in 2023, according to a Mercer survey. But there’s still some     1    : only 9% say they will allow employees to work remotely daily.

    2    , flexibility around when employees work is just as important as where. In the survey, 66% of employers said they would offer flexible work schedules over the course of a typical work day, such as specific times during the week to     3     to personal matters and four-day work weeks. Employees no longer want to organize their personal life around a(n)     4     work schedule but instead want the two interwoven, so they can decide what to prioritize and when.

Pas     5     against making hollow promises about a company’s commitment to work-life balance. “If employees feel a disconnection between programs that are rolled out and what senior leaders really expect, credibility is questioned, and the goodwill created through the program is denied.” He cites paid time off to volunteer, which almost half (45%) of companies say they will add to their benefits     6     next year.

Other benefits requiring a broader organizational buy-in are sabbaticals(公休假) and unlimited vacation days. Both benefits encourage employees to pursue interests outside of work with     7     periods off. Still, if they feel a dishonour associated with taking advantage of them, they’ll be hesitant to do so. The relatively low     8     rates for 2023, though—only 12% for sabbaticals and 15% for unlimited vacation—indicate that employers are still against paying employees not to work.

Instead, they prefer to find new ways to give employees more money, with the rise of employer-funded lifestyle accounts, which are often reserved for big-ticket items that might otherwise require some     9    . Nevertheless, only 12% of employers said they would add lifestyle accounts in 2023, and 70% said they are considering them, which could indicate a trend on the horizon.

But perhaps the most telling statistic about the importance of     10     work-life balance is the number of companies that said they don’t plan to offer any additional benefits to support work-life balance: a mere 5%.

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Adventure of a Lifetime

I was driving with a friend recently and telling him about a new book I’m working on, an article I'm writing and this new hobby of adventure motorcycling in the desert.

He interrupted me and said, “How do you stay so    1    about things?” I hadn’t really considered the “why” behind my list of activities. But as I thought about it, I realized that the one aspect each of these projects had to make me so excited was the feeling of being in just a little over my head.

It’s easy to wonder how doing stuff that makes you uncomfortable, and might not even work, is a（n）    2    of motivation. I could not get my friend’s question out of my head and wondered whether I'm wired differently. But there’s something about a sink-or-swim environment that excites me.

I posted on Instagram about    3    getting in a little over my head, and my friend Dallas Hartwig told me about this concept called hormesis, a phenomenon by which something that could significantly damage or even kill you in high doses can make you stronger in low doses, or as the National Institutes of Health puts it, an adaptive response of cells and organisms to a（n）    4    stress. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is not a new concept. It’s well     5    that the way to grow muscle is to split the muscle tissue, and then give it time to    6    .

So what if we did the same thing in other areas of our lives? It makes sense that the business    7    of building muscle is trying new things. When you throw yourself into the deep end of something new, you often face a（n）    8    learning curve. That forces you to grow,    9    , change and develop your skill set. It’s almost    10    if the particular project ends up succeeding, because the very act of taking on something new helps you become better at your work over all.

As a columnist, my daily job is to create informative articles     1     to a wide audience. I start by choosing unique and interesting     2    , which could be anything from the     3     benefits of exercise to the     4     importance of cybersecurity. Once I have my topic, I do extensive research to gather data and insights that will help me     5     my point effectively.

To ensure the quality of my writing, I stick to a strict schedule and am     6     to writing several drafts before finalizing a piece. This     7     effort helps me maintain a high level of consistency and ensures that my readers enjoy reading my work.

One of the most important aspects of my job is to remain     8     while covering sensitive topics. For instance, if I’m writing about cybersecurity, I need to     9     provide information without promoting any particular product or service.

Overall, being a columnist is a challenging but rewarding     10     that requires dedication, creativity, and a passion for writing.

Will a Robot Really Take Your Job?

It is one of the most widely quoted data of recent years. No report or conference presentation on the future of work is complete without it. It has been pointed to as evidence of a(n)     1     jobs disaster by think-tanks and government agencies. The finding that 47 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being     2     by the mid-2030s comes from a paper written by two Oxford academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne. It has since been     3     in more than 4,000 other academic articles. Such misunderstandings reflect the polarized (两极分化的) debate     4     the nature of automation and the future of jobs.

At one extreme are the negativists. They warn of mass technological     5     just around the corner. One advocate of this position, Martin Ford, has written two best-selling books on the dangers of unemployment caused by automation. He worries that middle-class jobs will disappear, economic     6     will cease, and the richest people in a country could “shut themselves away in gated communities, perhaps guarded by self-directed military robots and drones.” The     7     masses will live on a universal basic income.

At the positive end of the debate, classical economists argue that in the past, new technology has always ended up creating more jobs than it has destroyed. It was several decades before industrialization led to     8     higher wages for British workers in the early 1800s. While automation is likely to increase     9     in the short run by pushing some people into lower-paid jobs, it eventually increases the overall size of the economic pie.

Frey is often     10     to be in the first camp. His paper simply wanted to point out that 47 percent of the current jobs in America were more likely to be affected by automation. It got more attention than they would ever have expected. In part, this is because fear sells, particularly when it is stirred up by a misunderstanding.

Well, a doctor's life can be quite     1    as I have many patients to see. I usually leave my     2    at 6.30 am and get to work by seven in the morning. I work 12-hour     3    in the hospital. Being a doctor means l have to make correct decisions all the time, which puts a lot of pressure on me. Although being a doctor keeps me very busy, with little time for     4    . I have no regrets as I love solving problems and I get to help people       5    illnesses and injuries.

After     1     college, Jade gave up the high-paying     2     in a department (部门) of the province, but    3     a job at the charity organization. He     4     to make a contribution to charity. Besides, he was     5     to do a favor (帮助) to the native people.