As Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist and author, wrote in her 1997 book Time Bind:

Home had become work and work had become home.

The importance of a good company culture now has research backing it up.

In offices with good company culture, employees are happy to come to work. Recent studies only prove that the warm and fuzzies employees when they’re at work are real. Two researchers, Adrianne Frech and Sarah Damaske, monitored volunteers’ levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, multiple times throughout the day, and had them rate their happiness level. In an interview with NPR, Damaske summed up their findings,

“When we looked at the difference between home and work in terms of their cortisol levels — that biological marker of stress — we found that people’s cortisol levels were significantly lower at work than they were at home.”

The results were similar even in employees from different socio-economic backgrounds, which “suggested to us that people — at least biologically speaking — had lower levels of stress at work,” she said.

A nationwide poll found that the stress that people carry with them is usually personal: “health problems, the death of loved ones, and juggling busy family schedules often scored among the top sources of stress.”

Besides, people are more attached to stress and problems they have at home. As Damaske said in an interview: “No matter how urgent something is at work, you are not as attached to that urgency as you would be to, say, a health scare or the death of a loved one, because we are emotionally entangled at home in a way that we aren’t at work.”

A Bad Day At The Office Beats…?

Bad days at work are less devastating than a bad day at home. It’s also easier to talk about how you fought with your boss than it is to talk about arguments at home. You can shake a bad meeting off, but personal issues are often harder for employees to compartmentalize. These studies emphasize why work-life balance and company culture is so important for employees: work is often the place they’re happiest.

Is it happy where you work?

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