Employees across the world strive to strike a balance between work and life and it doesn’t swing with the gender.
Universally, if you ask people what do they want to with more time, the most popular answers are spending time with family or travel. This implies that people do value every moment of the personal time, they can get.
According to a survey done by Workforce Institute, 44 per cent of the respondents worldwide wanted to use their free time with family, and around 43 per cent wanted to go on a vacation. Around 30 per cent also wanted spend time with their friends, while 29 per cent wished to spend time pursuing a hobby.
While sleep emerged as a favourite free time activity for rest of the world, Indians seem to be not that sleep deprived. While globally, 27 per cent of people wished for more sleep time, in India, the figure was only 16 per cent.
Globally, the most popular free time activities was same – family and travel – across countries, however, the remaining free time activities among the popular 5 changed as per the country and region.
For instance, employees in France, Germany, U.S wished for more sleep time besides family and travel, people in India and the UK wanted some free time to learn a new skill or pursue a hobby. In India and Mexico, one of the popular free time activity was entertainment which included watching television, movies, or listening to music.
Now if we move on to the next part of the survey and ask people what would they like to do if they had some extra free day from work, Indians were more than willing to learn new skills vis-à-vis other countries. For instance, the corresponding figures for other countries such as the U.K., Mexico, and Australia was 49 percent, 48 percent 47 per cent, respectively. This goes on to say that they are willing to acquire new skill set but without compromising on their personal free time on the weekends. They were willing to pursue this only if the company moved to a four day a week.
The survey was conducted by Future of Workplace on behalf of Kronos, and the responses were received through e-mails targeting full-time and part-time employees..
It sure is a great sign for Indian employers, with the larger chunk of employees preferring to learn and develop new professional skills, to stay relevant in the market over resting and sleeping.
