Work Life Balance UK: Is It Getting Better or Worse?

Work–life balance has stopped being a perk you offer when you’ve got budget left over. It’s now a filter candidates apply before they’ll even consider your role. But whether the UK picture is genuinely improving or deteriorating depends entirely on who you are, what job you do and which employer you work for.

The headline numbers offer a split scenario: more people have access to flexibility than ever before, but stress-related absence has reached levels that should worry anyone responsible for keeping a team functional.

This article cuts through the rhetoric you’ve likely heard to examine what’s actually happening with work–life balance across the UK. You’ll see the current data on worker wellbeing, understand what changed after the pandemic (and what didn’t), explore the stark differences between sectors and find practical steps employers can take if they want to attract talent who’ll stay longer than 18 months.

The Truth About Work Life Balance in the UK Right Now

Key Statistics on UK Worker Wellbeing (2024–2025)

The Health and Safety Executive estimates that 22.1 million working days were lost to stress, depression or anxiety during 2024/25. To put that in context, musculoskeletal disorders accounted for 7.1 million days over the same period (less than a third of the mental-health burden). The severity is notable too: people off work with stress, depression or anxiety were absent for an average of 22.9 days per case, compared to 14.0 days for musculoskeletal issues.

HSE’s days-lost estimates come from self-reporting household surveys; the Labour Force Survey for workplace injuries and the Self-reported Work-related Illness surveys for ill health. The methodology has limits (people don’t always attribute stress to work accurately, and self-selection bias exists), but the scale and consistency of the data make it hard to dismiss.

Lived experience backs up the macro picture. CIPD’s UK Working Lives survey (5,496 UK workers surveyed between 8 January and 15 February 2024, weighted to be representative of working adults) found that 21% of employees feel excessive pressure ‘always’ or ‘often’, and 24% feel exhausted at the same frequency. That’s not a majority, but it’s a large enough minority to signal that workload intensity remains a material problem even when headline job-quality scores look stable.

The Post-Pandemic Shift: What Actually Changed

It’s not that people suddenly discovered they wanted flexibility, but more that they stopped trusting work to deliver meaning or security in return for overcommitment.

CIPD tracked this through two simple questions. In 2019, 36% of UK workers agreed that ‘a job is just about the money and nothing else.’ By 2024, that figure had climbed to 47%. Over the same period, the share willing to ‘work harder than needed to help the organisation’ fell from 57% to 51%. When job insecurity and cost-of-living pressure collide, people re-evaluate how much discretionary effort they’re willing to give when the psychological contract feels one-sided.

Work has become less trusted as a route to a good life, and candidates now filter opportunities through that lens before they even apply.

Why Work Life Balance Matters to Your Next Hire

Top Talent Won’t Compromise on Culture

According to ONS data from January to March 2025, 28% of working adults in Great Britain worked in a hybrid pattern, and the proportion has gradually risen since March 2022. That’s more than one in four workers who’ve now experienced the autonomy of splitting their time between locations; and for many, it has reset their baseline expectations.

ONS additionally found that employees were more likely than the self-employed to hybrid work (30% versus 24%), and full-time workers were more likely than part-time workers to do so (34% versus 18%). Hybrid working is particularly common in professional and associate professional occupations and among higher earners, which means the talent pools you’re competing for in finance, accounting and professional services have lived this way for years.

They’re not going to accept a return to rigid office-first models unless you’ve got a compelling reason.

The Cost of Poor Work-Life Balance (Turnover, Productivity, Retention)

To be clear, ‘days lost’ isn’t a perfect proxy for work–life balance. People go off sick for many reasons, and attribution is messy. But it is a hard indicator of system-level strain, and the direction of travel matters.

When your team is operating at the edge of capacity week after week, you don’t just lose output during absence periods. You lose the discretionary effort that makes good work happen. You lose institutional knowledge when people leave. You lose the ability to flex when a client deadline moves or a project scope expands. And you lose the goodwill that keeps someone answering a late email during a genuine crisis rather than switching their phone off at 5:31pm because they’ve learned that ‘urgent’ just means ‘poorly planned.’

How Flexible Working Became a Competitive Advantage

There’s a difference between the right to ask and the reality of receiving. The Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023 came into force on 6 April 2024, and GOV.UK now states that employees can make a statutory request for flexible working from their first day in a job. That’s a meaningful legal alteration, as it removed the previous 26-week qualifying period and made the request a day-one right.

The competitive advantage comes from what you build on top of that baseline: roles designed for output rather than input, managers trained to handle distributed teams, workloads set at sustainable levels and cultural norms that don’t punish people for using the flexibility they’re formally offered.

Access isn’t equal, and that inequality shapes who you can attract.

Work Life Balance by Industry: Who’s Winning, Who’s Losing

Tech & Media (Best Practices)

Some sectors had a structural head start. If your work outputs are digital, your deliverables are measurable, and your tooling is modern, you can operationalise flexibility more easily than industries built on physical presence or synchronous collaboration.

ONS data also shows that hybrid work is significantly more common among degree-level workers (41% in January–March 2025) and those in professional occupations, which includes large parts of the tech and media workforce. When your performance is visible through shipped code, published content, or completed campaigns rather than hours logged in a specific building, location becomes negotiable.

That doesn’t mean tech and media have solved work–life balance. Intensity, scope creep and always-on expectations remain real problems. But the baseline flexibility infrastructure is in place, and candidates in these sectors now treat hybrid or remote options as table stakes rather than perks.

Finance & Professional Services (Where Candidates Struggle)

Finance and professional services occupy an uncomfortable middle ground. Many roles sit inside higher-income professional categories with decent hybrid access (ONS confirms that pattern). So the problem isn’t ‘no flexibility.’ It’s workload intensity paired with weak boundary control.

Client responsiveness expectations are baked into service models. Utilisation targets create structural pressure to bill hours; and presenteeism cultures persist in firms where partnership tracks still reward ‘being seen’ alongside measurable performance.

Here’s a useful framework for unpacking what ‘flexibility’ actually means in practice:

· Flexibility of location: where work happens (office, home, third space).

· Flexibility of time: when work happens (core hours, asynchronous work, compressed weeks).

· Flexibility of load: how much work is expected (realistic targets, protected non-working time).

· Flexibility of control: ability to say no, prioritise, or escalate (manager behaviour, resourcing norms).

Finance and professional services often deliver on the first dimension and fail on the last three. Candidates can work from home two days a week, but they’re still expected to respond to emails at 10pm, hit utilisation rates that assume zero downtime, and absorb scope changes without pushback. That’s not work–life balance. That’s location flexibility with the same dysfunctional workload.

Emerging Sectors Leading the Charge

Some organisations are experimenting with more fundamental redesigns. The UK four-day week pilot (run by Autonomy, Cambridge and others between June and December 2022 across 61 companies and around 2,900 workers) produced results that got attention. At the end of the trial, 56 of the 61 participating companies (92%) continued with the four-day week, and a subset made it permanent.

Before you dismiss this as irrelevant, recognise what it signals: a growing number of employers are willing to redesign time itself, not just location. They’re questioning whether five days of input is actually necessary to achieve the required output, and they’re testing whether shorter, more focused weeks can deliver comparable results with better wellbeing and retention.

That said, these pilots are opt-in organisations, often with strong leadership buy-in and implementation support. Results don’t transfer automatically to every regulated, client-facing, or shift-based environment. But they do prove that the current model isn’t inevitable.

The Bottom Line: Is Work Life Balance Getting Better or Worse?

Where It’s Genuinely Improving

Improvement is real in specific dimensions. Hybrid working has continued to normalise, which suggests this isn’t a pandemic blip that’ll vanish the moment leadership decides everyone needs to ‘collaborate’ in person again. Some change has stuck.

CIPD also found that workplace conflict fell from 30% in 2019 to 25% in 2024. There’s a stipulation here though, with CIPD noting this may be linked to increased homeworking rather than better interpersonal behaviour. People working from home more frequently (76%+ of the time) reported lower conflict (15%) than those doing no homeworking (29%).

So we’re not necessarily kinder to each other; we’re just in the same room less often. But reduced friction is still an improvement in lived experience, even if the cause isn’t inspiring.

Autonomy has expanded, to put it another way. Rigid presenteeism has softened in many sectors, and those should be considered as wins.

Where It’s Actually Deteriorating

Deterioration shows up in intensity, pressure and mental-health burden. The severity (an average of 22.9 days off per case for stress, depression or anxiety) suggests people aren’t experiencing minor strain. They’re almost hitting breaking points.

CIPD’s pressure and exhaustion data (21% and 24% reporting ‘always/often’) confirms that a significant minority of the workforce is operating at unsustainable levels. Flexibility of location doesn’t fix this if workloads remain unrealistic, boundaries stay weak and organisational cultures still reward overwork.

We’ve made progress on where work happens. We’ve made less progress on how much work is expected and how it’s managed day to day.

The Sectors Stuck in the Middle

The ‘middle’ is where flexibility exists on paper but isn’t always paired with realistic workloads or equitable access. Workers with degree-level qualifications were ten times more likely to hybrid work than those with no qualifications (41% versus 4% in January–March 2025). Disabled workers were less likely than non-disabled workers to hybrid (24% versus 29%).

So ‘better or worse’ depends on who you are and what job you do. If you’re a degree-educated professional in a digital-output role, your options have probably expanded. If you’re in a lower-income, routine occupation with limited qualifications and a disability, you’re more likely to be locked out of the flexibility gains that dominate the conversation.

What Candidates Are Really Looking For (And What They’re Not Finding)

Beyond ‘Flexible Working’: What Modern Talent Expects

Candidates aren’t fooled by generic language anymore. They want specifics: What are your core hours? Can I adjust my start time? How do you handle school pick-up? What’s the response-time expectation for emails outside working hours? Do managers respect protected time, or is there social pressure to stay online?

Good work–life balance, from a candidate perspective, looks like predictability, protected time, manageable peaks and manager behaviour that supports boundaries rather than undermining them. That translates into practical asks: meeting-free blocks, workload transparency, realistic resourcing, response-time norms and consequences when those norms get breached.

The Gap Between Employer Promises and Reality

Lower conflict among high-homeworking groups might just mean people are avoiding difficult conversations rather than resolving them. Hybrid policies can mask culture problems unless workload, behaviours and psychological safety are addressed at the same time.

Candidates are increasingly fluent at spotting this gap during interviews. They’ll ask how you resource projects, what happened the last time someone said no to additional work and whether your flexible-working policy has actually been used by senior people. If your answers are vague or defensive, they’ll assume the policy is decorative.

Red Flags Candidates Now Notice Immediately

Job descriptions with vague expectations (‘fast-paced environment,’ ‘wear many hats’) that hint at understaffing. Policies that say ‘flexible’ but include rigid core hours that make flexibility meaningless. Presenteeism language in interview conversations (‘we work hard and play hard,’ ‘our team is always available’). Unclear resourcing that suggests scope creep is normal. No boundaries on out-of-hours contact, or worse, an unspoken expectation that responsiveness is how commitment is measured.

Candidates don’t need perfection. They need honesty. If your busy season is brutal, say so, and explain how you protect recovery time afterward. If client demands occasionally require weekend work, be upfront and clarify how that’s compensated or balanced. Don’t disguise tough jobs as balanced ones.

How Smart Employers Are Attracting Top Talent Through Culture

Best-in-Class Workplace Policies UK Companies Are Implementing

The best employers treat work–life balance as an operating system, not a benefits package. That means workload planning that accounts for non-working time, no-meeting blocks that are genuinely protected, clear escalation paths when capacity is exceeded, and manager training that focuses on output and boundaries rather than hours logged.

We’re not suggesting every firm can or should move to a four-day model; regulated industries, client-facing roles and shift-based work create clear constraints. But the willingness to experiment with fundamentals (not just tinker with location) is what separates employers who’ll attract top talent from those who’ll lose it to competitors with better design.

If you’re looking to build a team that stays, consider how permanent recruitment partnerships can help you articulate and deliver on these commitments from the start.

The Candidates You’ll Lose Without This

Talent may comply with poor work–life balance in the short term (especially if they need the income or the experience) but retention and discretionary effort become fragile. They’ll do what’s contractually required and nothing more. When a better opportunity appears, they’ll leave without hesitation. And they’ll tell their networks to avoid you.

ROI of Investing in Work-Life Balance

You’re likely to see reduced absence burden, improved sustainability of performance and better retention of high performers who have options elsewhere. You’re also more likely to attract candidates in the first place, which shortens time-to-hire and reduces agency dependency.

What should you measure? Track absence days by team and reason. Monitor regretted attrition (people you wanted to keep who left anyway). Survey engagement and workload perception quarterly. Watch utilisation and overtime patterns. Check internal mobility too; good work–life balance often shows up as people staying and growing rather than leaving for better conditions.

Don’t invent unsupported ROI percentages, is the point. Measure what matters to your operation, set a baseline and track changes over time.

The Recruitment Challenge: Finding Talent That Fits Your Culture

Why Generic Job Ads No Longer Work

Here’s the problem with ‘we offer flexible working’ as a standalone line in your job ad: it means different things to different people.

A candidate currently hybrid working four days a week interprets ‘flexible’ differently from someone in a rigid five-day office role. If your version of flexible is ‘you can start at 9:30am instead of 9am,’ you’re going to attract the wrong expectations and lose credibility fast.

Because hybrid access varies so dramatically by occupation, income and qualification level, candidates are applying a personal baseline shaped by their current situation. Generic language always fails to signal the true deal, which means you’ll either undershoot (losing candidates who need more) or overshoot (attracting people who’ll be disappointed).

The Hidden Cost of Poor Cultural Fit

When someone joins expecting one level of flexibility and workload, then discovers the reality is something else, the damage happens quickly. Sick days rise, conflict increases, productivity drops, and exits follow; often within the first year, right when you’ve invested the most in onboarding and before you’ve seen meaningful return.

A meaningful slice of the HSE stress burden comes from misalignment between what was promised and what’s delivered. The fix isn’t to overpromise. It’s to describe your actual operating model clearly, then find people who’ll thrive in it.

How Strategic Hiring Partners Match Values, Not Just Skills

This is where working with a specialist recruiter who understands cultural fit becomes valuable. At Career Moves Group, we run structured intake conversations about your workload norms, your flexibility reality, your manager behaviours and your peak-period expectations. Then we pre-brief candidates so they’re assessing fit from both sides, not just hoping for the best.

We also check in post-placement. If someone’s struggling with workload or boundaries three months in, we want to know; because that’s feedback you can use to recalibrate your next hire, and it’s a relationship we can help repair before it breaks.

If you’re hiring at senior levels where cultural misalignment is especially costly, explore how executive search partnerships can reduce that risk.

What’s Next for Work Life Balance in the UK?

Predictions for 2025–2026

Hybrid working will remain common, but the inequality gaps won’t close quickly. Education, income, disability and deprivation will continue to shape who has access and who doesn’t.

Data suggests those divides are structural, not temporary, and they’re embedded in the nature of different occupations. Expect ongoing tension between sectors where flexibility is operationally feasible and those where it isn’t. And watch for resentment when ‘flexibility’ is framed as a universal win while large parts of the workforce stay excluded.

Legislative floors will rise slightly, but they won’t equal flexible work delivery unless job design changes. The right to request is now a day-one entitlement, but requests can still be refused on business grounds, and proving unreasonableness remains difficult. The competitive gap will widen between employers who design roles for flexibility and those who offer it reluctantly.

Experimentation will likely continue. More four-day week pilots, more compressed schedules, more results-only work environments. Adoption will vary by operating constraints (client-facing professional services, regulated industries and shift-based work face real barriers) but the direction of travel is toward questioning inherited structure rather than defending it.

How to Future-Proof Your Employer Brand

If you want to stay competitive for talent over the next few years, start by publishing realistic expectations. Don’t hide your busy seasons or pretend workload is always manageable. Show your boundary rules: when you expect responses, when you don’t, and what happens if those norms get breached. Train your managers to lead distributed teams, manage by output and support people who use flexibility rather than indirectly penalising them.

It’s important to measure workload, not just engagement. Survey your team on whether work volume is sustainable, whether they can switch off and whether they feel able to say no when capacity is exceeded. Then act on what you find, and communicate what you’ve changed.

Most importantly, be honest about your peak periods and recovery time. Candidates don’t need perfect balance all year round. They need predictability, transparency and evidence that you won’t burn them out and then replace them.

Ready to Attract Talent That Actually Stays?

If you’re serious about attracting talent who’ll stay, invest in the operating system (not just the policy document). Design roles for output. Resource realistically. Train managers. Set boundaries. Measure workload. Be transparent.

For employers: Let’s Talk About Building a Better Workplace Culture. Get in touch to discuss how we can help you attract and retain the people who’ll grow your business.

For candidates: Find roles that prioritise work-life balance. Explore our opportunities and speak to consultants who’ll tell you what the job’s really like before you apply.

FAQs