The Mental Health Foundation says that “the pressure of an increasingly demanding work culture in the UK is perhaps the biggest and most pressing challenge to the mental health of the general population.” How do we find a work-life balance?
Complex times.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, the pressures on good mental health have become much greater and more complex. People have been obliged to work from home, without social or professional support from colleagues. Others have, or will, lose their jobs as the economic consequences of coronavirus are felt.
Before Covid-19, work-related stress cost the UK 10.4 million working days per year, with the human cost of unmanaged work-related stress extending far beyond that. While we can’t accurately predict what the new normal will look like, and it will be different for everyone, we absolutely know that safeguarding mental health must be a priority – for individuals and the government, and everyone in between.
One key to that is to ensure that you have a healthy work-life balance.
And it’s not just mental health problems. A study conducted by UCL of more than 10,000 participants found that white-collar workers who worked three or more hours longer than required had a 60% higher risk of heart-related problems than those who didn’t work overtime.
Returning to normal.
According to the global 2017 Randstad Employer Brand Research report, after an attractive salary and long-term job security (58% and 46% respectively), 45% of surveyed employees note good work-life balance as an important attribute in gauging the attractiveness of an organisation. Indeed, according to Universum, work-life balance continues to be an important objective for a majority of students looking to gain employment. That’s why, when the world begins to return to normal – whatever normal is – we must all reassess our own work-life balance.
Working life.
In that brave new world, many of us will continue to work from home, or in shift patterns that help social distancing. But if we are to work from home, one more fundamental question might be, why not simply work for ourselves from home?
In other words, make work-life balance the central component in your life at work and away from work.
It’s a choice that more and more of us have been making in recent years, with freelance workers making up a greater and greater part of the UK’s workforce. But that dream of self-employed freedom comes at a price. You have to be good at what you do. And that’s where we come in because our creative courses are designed to make you the very best that could be. We don’t offer off-the-peg courses. We do offer one-to-one courses that are no different to those from a brick-and-mortar college. Except that you can fit a course with us around your other commitments
At the end of it, you’ll have an internationally-recognised qualification and the newfound confidence and skills to be the very best creative there is!
That confidence and those skills will be fundamental to working in the new normal. They will, and already are, fundamental to work-life balance – and good mental health.
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