Attaining work-life balance is still as hard as ever. Even with more options for flexibility, Ernst & Young reported last year that one third of employees felt this imbalance skew more and more towards the demands of their job. Guilt, burnout, and stress are the unhappy products of how this disproportion plays out—on the one hand a feeling of professional underperformance, on the other a neglected personal life.
But increasingly, the gaps between life and labor are being questioned by a new generation of leaders, by a rising incidence of employee dissatisfaction, and by technologies that afford different forms of collaboration. A new report by Staples Business Advantage confirms that work-life balance is being supplanted by work-life integration. The Staples Business Advantage 2016 Workplace Index reveals some of the prevalent feelings in office spaces across the United States and Canada. The survey was conducted online with over three thousand office workers and decision makers. Boundaries are blurring, they found, partly because people still find their office to be the most productive for work, if not the most inspiring.