Maintaining a work-life balance

Everyone's working too hard. Protect employees as well as the bottom line with some handy advice from careers correspondent Daniel Wain

Which issue increasingly consumes the HR professional's working life? Ironically, work-life balance. The topic now runs the well-established cash-cow of leadership a close second in number of Google links. Go to www.employersforwork-lifebalance.org.uk and you can be directly rerouted to 17.9 million other sites. One would need a very long life to work through all of those.


A very delicate balance
Born in the 1970s work-life balance (or WLB) initially focused on supporting working mums through various flexible schemes: job shares, late starts, home-working. The approach gradually extended to other employees searching a more flexible working life, encompassing HR practices such as extended leave, study leave and secondments. The concept has now mushroomed to include anything that impacts upon an employee's engagement at work or their motivation to go the extra mile. Thus at FreshMinds, says HR Analyst Annali Hayward, as well as traditional benefits such as time in lieu for long hours worked, employees can also access welfare packages, including gym membership, and social events like FreshSnow, an annual subsidised skiing holiday for employees and, significantly, their families.

For organisational development consultant Helen James, WLB requires "both good people management practice (as well as self-management) and organisational policies on how the workforce is managed and resourced. To be successful an organisation's work-life balance strategy has to identify the business and operational needs, as well as the organisation's values, before adopting HR policies that match those. The company must investigate how it can organise the work in a different, more effective way that's beneficial to both employee and employer."


Workaholics not so anonymous
The rise of WLB is almost certainly linked to the equally relentless advance of the high-performance culture, employers expecting ever more and employees working ever harder to sustain their increasingly consumerist lifestyles. However, this all too easily leads to workaholism, defined by researchers at the University of North Carolina as "the compulsive need to work at the expense of everything else in one's life". They claim that one quarter of US employees are now workaholics and that, apart from the downsides for them (stress, illness, damaged relationships), overwork is the biggest productivity killer in today's workplace, costing US business $150 billion last year.

Sound familiar? Nick Bonney, Market Insight Director at Orange, believes that "Too many researchers work too hard. On the agencyside people can suffer long hours due to a lack of investment in automated systems and the drive to maintain margins. Whilst the perception that hours are shorter clientside isn't true. Much depends on sector and type of work, but clientside researchers are handling, for example, an increasing amount of incredibly time-consuming internal communication".


The curse of the CrackBerry
Technological advances should have eased not only communication but WLB. For example, all of Bonney's team have mobile phones rather than fixed lines and many employers now provide broadband at home. PDAs, including the BlackBerry, were designed to unleash new possibilities for organising work alongside family and other duties, giving employees greater freedom and flexibility. 'Martini working' (any time, any place, anywhere) was also intended, as Tony Nelson of consultant BrQthru says, "to increase productivity, due to fewer distractions and no travelling time". BT's home-based call centre operators, for example, handle 20% more calls than their site-based colleagues.

However, the potential liberator has become a jailer. The BlackBerry is now the CrackBerry. Research by Northampton University reveals that a third of all BlackBerry users are textbook-defined addicts, displaying some of the same symptoms (denial, withdrawal, anti-social behaviour) as alcoholics. Rather than enabling more time out, technology has fuelled an always on culture. A recent 'Leaders in London' conference revealed that 77% of senior UK managers have checked emails at weddings, birthday parties and even on dates, whilst 61% never work more than 15 minutes without interruption. What impact must that have on productivity, never mind work-life balance?


Brave new world
So are we facing an Orwellian future of electronically controlled drones? According to the UK Work Foundation there's clear evidence that Generation Y has very different expectations from the parents who made them BlackBerry Orphans. "They work to live, not live to work," says James M Morland of trend consultancy Barrie-Gray. "They care less about salaries and more about flexible working and time to travel. And employers are having to meet their increasing demands." For Annali Hayward, an employer needs to recognise that "different employee demographics have different needs and motivators. In a service business like ours we have to take these things seriously".

As well as generational differences, there's strong evidence of geographical variance, with most of the workaholism/stress research emanating from the US or the UK. According to a recent 'Guardian' report, the UK now works the longest hours in Europe, whilst research from Watson Wyatt shows that 48% of US employers believe stress caused by long working hours is affecting their business performance, though only 5% are addressing the concern. Morland observes that, "In continental Europe, they've generally got a much better WLB. For instance, most Europeans outside the UK take a proper lunch break, usually communally, rather than munch a sandwich over the keyboard, and their family commitments definitely take priority over work. If an Italian's child is in the school play, that report, however urgent, can wait. And you never see a Frenchman checking his Blackberry during August." Tony Nelson believes differing priorities aren't just culturally-driven, but are also due to legislation: "quite simply, employees have much greater, stronger legal rights in continental Europe."

Organisational culture can be just as strong an influence as geography or regulation. For Helen James, WLB is "more about company culture and mindset than processes and policies. Or should be." No matter how healthy or balanced individuals are upon joining, if it's a dysfunctional system they'll soon burn out. James believes that, as with so much of HR, good line management is fundamental. "A bad manager, who doesn't set his people clear expectations and goals, understand their individual motivations or acknowledge their efforts, will undermine any formal work-life balance practices. It's less about establishing policies than ensuring management's tactical, everyday approach is consistent with the organisation's grander intentions".


Model behaviour
For Tim Holden, Managing Director of Fluid Consulting, "role modelling is crucial. If the manager's working all hours, there's clear pressure on the team to do likewise, creating a particularly vicious circle. Managers must set boundaries, clearly demonstrating that excessive work isn't expected or condoned". Managers need WLB as much as, if not more than, other employees, says Tony Nelson: "To be an effective and innovative leader, you need to have sufficient headroom, thinking space, something that the most successful CEOs know and ensure they give themselves."

Ultimately much of work-life balance comes down to personal responsibility. Certainly this is the belief of WLB expert, Professor David Clutterbuck: "It's about self-awareness and choice – being aware of the different demands on one's time and energy and having the ability to make choices about how you allocate those." For Helen James, it's not just people wanting to reduce their working hours, but "fulfilling their aspirations and broader responsibilities – hence the growth in freelancing and portfolio careers. And, in the case of technology, controlling it rather than vice versa." After all, every BlackBerry has an off switch.

There are signs that, in the UK, possibly thanks to the rise of Generation Y, WLB is changing. The 2007 Roffey Park Management Agenda reports that 62% of UK employees believe they've achieved it, compared to only 52% in 2003, while 67% now say they would refuse a promotion if it affected their work-life balance.


Never mind the timesheet, feel the quality
Perhaps we're beginning to refocus, away from time spent and hours worked to outputs and results. As Morland says, "In many organisations, employees are busy for busy's sake, being praised, or not punished, for working long hours rather than for what they produce or contribute in that time. But, certainly in the UK and US, I think this is beginning to change, albeit slowly." Perhaps it's the gradual realisation that longer hours do not lead to better financial performance, quite often the reverse. Employee burn-out results in higher absence rates, greater workplace conflict and increased staff turnover, all of which impact directly on the bottom line. The Watson Wyatt 2008 'Staying@Work' report shows stress as the most frequently cited reason US workers give for leaving a company. Interestingly, it doesn't even make the top five reasons why employers think people leave.

By addressing work-life balance, companies can benefit from less absenteeism, higher productivity and competitiveness, increased employee commitment and engagement, greater flexibility, improved customer service, a better employer brand and thus a greater recruitment pool.


Clouds on the horizon
A spanner in the work-life rebalance could be the global economic downturn. It's currently hard to predict how much this might impact employees' demands for greater WLB and organisational support for it. However, recent Chartered Institute of Marketing research points to a significant increase in the number of senior executives cancelling or postponing holiday plans this year or continuing to work whilst allegedly on leave, and the UK's Trades Union Congress has recently expressed concern that "due to the challenging economic climate, employers are more reluctant to recruit new staff and so are working existing employees harder". Morland believes that the growth in the BRIC markets will also have an impact upon Generation Y'ers in developed countries: "Faced with increasing overseas competition for jobs, and in particular a very different Asian work ethic, I wonder how long they'll be able to maintain the same demanding attitude."

"All this questions whether work-life balance is even the right phrase", says Helen James, suggesting "work-life fulfilment" is now more appropriate. "Hard work, and even stress, can be positive, if they energise and motivate". Annali Hayward agrees: " It's not about the number of hours, it's more the quality of those hours for both parties." This is undoubtedly true. One can work very short hours, or none at all, and still be demotivated, dissatisfied and unfulfilled. Just ask any resting actor.


Key notes:
    • Work-life balance (WLB) is much more than flexible working hours – it's about employee fulfilment and engagement resulting in increased productivity and competitive advantage

• Ensure your WLB strategy is directly linked to your company's business needs, priorities and vision – for both the employees' and employer's benefit

• Different people will value different WLB practices and policies – be flexible with your offer as well as your hours

• Technology can and should be an enabler of greater WLB but is all too frequently its most insidious enemy: a ball and chain rather than a 'get out of jail free card'. If you give your people a BlackBerry, keep reminding them that it has an off switch...

• ... and that they share responsibility for their own WLB

• Ensure managers and leaders act as WLB role-models. They need time and space to think and live too...

• WLB is more about culture and mindset than processes and policies

• Focus less on the hours worked and more on what's achieved in the hours worked

August | 2008