Singapore Is Second-Most Overworked City
A new study has revealed that out of 40 major cities evaluated, Singapore not only ranks 32nd for work-life balance, but it is the second most overworked city – falling one spot behind Tokyo, with Washington, D.C. trailing behind at number three.
Meanwhile, Helsinki, Finland; Munich, Germany; and Oslo, Norway, came in top three for work-life balance. In each of those cities, only 5% of people worked more than 48 hours a week. In Singapore, that number hovers at 23%.
Defining work-life balance
The scores were evaluated based on three main categories:
- Work intensity, which includes things like arrival time, hours worked per week by full-time workers, the percentage of full-time workers working more than 48 hours of work a week, vacations taken, and paid maternal and parental leave.
- Society and institutions, which includes healthcare, gender equality, and access to mental healthcare.
- City livability, which includes the city’s safety score, happiness score, commuting time, fitness and wellness, and outdoor spaces score.
Cities were then given a total score out of 100, which signifies overall work-life balance health relative to the other cities on the list
Where Singapore falls
With Helsinki’s score at 100, Singapore’s came in at 36.36, just a few points above the three other Asian cities on the list: Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur, which came in last with a score of 1. So what makes us so busy?
- Work-work balance: In Singapore, people were given a minimum of 7 vacation days and took 14. In Helsinki, those numbers were 30 and 28.7.
- #BlameTrainBreakdown: Despite Singapore’s small land size, our commute time came out to 44.5 minutes, compared to Helsinki’s 26.
- Still, there are a couple of areas where Singapore scored well relative to the other cities on the list:
- Arrival Time: Employees arrived at 9:34 AM, which is later than the arrival time for the top 3 cities. (Knock-off time could be another story, but that wasn’t covered in the data set.)
- Safety score, outdoor spaces score, fitness and wellness score: In other words, since we have an abundance of safe public spaces, there’s no excuse to skip your post-work workout – provided that you can leave the office on time.
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