Helsinki was recently listed as the best city for work-life balance. The study factors included work intensity, society and institutions, as well as city livability. The survey covered 40 cities globally, consisted of 20 variables and was conducted by Kisi.

New York reached 21st place. In another nationwide survey, New York was ranked 5th, just after San Diego, Portland, San Francisco and Minneapolis.

So, why did Helsinki rank as the 1st and New York as 21st? Let’s take a closer look at the results.

Work intensity

It seems like New Yorkers are more hard-working people, or at least they are under more pressure to be so. Full time employees work about 40 hours a week in Helsinki, where as New Yorkers work for 2 hours more. They are no strangers to overtime either. On average, 14% of New Yorkers work over 48 hour weeks, while the percentage is only 5 in Helsinki.

But the bigger difference can be seen in the time spent on vacations. The gap grows wider with the minimum number of compensated vacation days an employee is legally entitled to (excluding public holidays). The number of days is 30 in Helsinki while in New York it’s 10. On average, 28.7 and 10.8 of those days are used, respectively. To add to the contrast there has been a news story circulating on how Finland’s prime minister would like to see a 4 day work week in the future.

Surprisingly, the average commute is only 10 minutes longer (36 minutes) in New York even though New York has over 13 times more people living here, not to mention the urban area. However, New Yorkers still arrive at work only 20 minutes later at 9:25.

New York is far behind Helsinki in terms of compensated family leave by law, but let’s not judge too harshly. Here, paid family leave by law is rare, almost non-existent. In fact, the United States has remained as the last industrialized country without guaranteed paid family leave. Only a few states have mandatory paid parental leave and New York state has the most comprehensive family leave policies. But Luckily many companies have established their own parental leave policies. 

Society and institutions factor didn’t bring any shocking revelations. The accessibility to quality healthcare services reached 86.7 (out of 100) in Helsinki and 71.6 in New York. The access to Mental healthcare scored a much lower in both cities: 58.9 in Helsinki and 47.2 in New York. There were no big differences in gender and LGBT+ equality scores. 

City Livability

As one might have guessed, Helsinki was ranked safer (93.3 vs. 87), less polluted (6.7 vs. 7,5 µg/m3) and happier (Finland was ranked to be the happiest country in 2019).

New York is a famously hectic city, so much so that it is 2,5 times more stressful than Helsinki. Funnily enough, it was only ranked as 6th in the national US study, placed after cities like Milwaukee (3rd) and Columbus (5th). Even though this is good news for New York, I don’t see Milwaukee taking New York’s place as the busiest city anytime soon. 

Before we crown Helsinki as the ultimate winner, let’s scrutinize the leisure score. New York won that category by nearly twofold. In fact, New York ranked the best of all of the cities in the global survey. There is nothing like the city that never sleeps when it comes to the options for culture, entertainment, restaurants, etc. New York was also listed as the second best city (behind Los Angeles) for kid’s activities in a study by Movinga. Sadly for New York though, the overall best city for families out of the 150 studied metropolises was Helsinki. 

What can I say, maybe Helsinki really is that good? 

By Nelli Karhu