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Work In Progress

Work → In Progress: Why 'Financial Wellness' Is Not Just About A Raise

The workplace wellness trend now includes the very practical questions about how, when and how much we get paid, and is shaping up to be the next step in blurring the lines between personal and professional that were once so neatly divided.

Work → In Progress: Why 'Financial Wellness' Is Not Just About A Raise
Rozena Crossman

We’re approaching the end of Q1 of 2022 and the “wellness” trend that’s usually reserved for millennials’ yoga mats has officially made its way into the professional world. After two years of realizing that job setups don’t always favor employees’ health, the call for sweeping workplace changes — ranging from more medical access to an HR focus on mental well-being — is in full swing.

But wouldn't you know: the latest professional self-care trend carries a notably practical air: financial wellness.

Bank of America’s 2021 Workplace Benefits Report mentioned “financial wellness” 43 times, which it defined as “the type of support employers are offering to address financial needs.” But is making money not the point of work? It seems this new rebranding of how work relates to cash is indicative of how differently we now view employment.

The financial wellness movement doesn’t want companies to just fairly compensate employees but instead to teach them how to manage their salaries, be it saving for retirement, navigating debt or budgeting.


Following in the footsteps of remote work, this trend is shaping up to be the next step in blurring the lines between personal and professional that were once so neatly divided. But it’s just one of many factors at play. From spying on employees’ online activity and rejecting telework to consolidating a labor market by using a common language, this edition of Work → In Progress gives you the good, the bad and the ugly of the latest news in work:

WATCHING YOU

Mere months after China’s Personal Information Protection Law was implemented, controversy stirred when a company found out their employee was searching for other jobs by spying on his internet activity… and fired him. South China Morning Post reports the company allegedly used a system that tracked if an employee had checked job sites, sent applications, and then ranked “employees by the level of perceived resignation risk.” The information, however, was apparently tracked on the company’s own computers. How private is employee data if they’re using their employer’s devices?

REMOTE CONTROL

While some countries are pulling out all the stops to attract remote workers, others want to put a lid on it. According to French media Welcome To The Jungle, Japanese employee productivity was reported to have dropped 20% due to a corporate culture that favors teamwork. Meanwhile, the Czech Republic remains the only country that hasn’t given telework a legal status, in part due to their strong culture of hierarchy. Angola scored 0 in all of the three criteria used by LGMB Worklabs to assess a location’s “teleworkability”: legal, cultural and technical.

STAT DU JOUR

LINGUA KISWAHILI 

The African Union recently decided to adopt Swahili (known as Kiswahili to native speakers) as an official language recognized for work. According to Actu Cameroun, the language is spoken in 14 countries on a continent that is rapidly drawing international investors. Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia has announced the launch of a Kiswahili language education program. The university’s president explained, “Having a common language has wider importance on the development of culture, politics and economy as well as for the welfare of the society in the region.”

LUCKY NUMBER 4

Following a similar trend to countries like Spain, Iceland and Japan, the Belgian government has approved a plan that will allow workers to choose a 4-day work week and enforces their right not to respond to messages after office hours. According to La Voix Du Nord, the measure still needs to be put before parliament, but its proponents hope these more flexible ways of working will raise the country’s employment rate to 80% by 2030 (currently at 71%).

NO DAYS OFF

Meanwhile, Mexico has some of the shortest legal paid vacation time in the entire world, thanks to a law that hasn’t changed in 50 years. With only 6 days off per year, available only after having completed one year of work at the company, Mexico was deemed as having some of the most precarious work regulations in Latin America by El País México. Yet two reform proposals were presented to parliament early this year, keeping the country in step with the international worklife revolution currently taking place.

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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