A balancing act: How research businesses approach work-life balance

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It is 9pm, and your phone lights up. An urgent email has come through from the Singapore office, and your immediate help is requested. Should you answer that email? Or should your company in fact have prevented it from being sent in the first place?

Work-life balance is a frequently used term in market research and beyond. And yet it means very different things to different people. It can range from time off for caring duties or a family emergency and hybrid or flexible working, to the opportunity to work in another country. It can be as basic as the ability to ignore emails after a certain time of day, or it could involve a more complex arrangement such as taking a year-long sabbatical to study or travel.

Does the market research industry do enough to promote a healthy work/life balance? In research for Impact, Hall & Partners surveyed 29 market research employees and found that 21 felt their company helped their work/life balance, while eight said it was hindered by their employer. A survey of 500 non-research employees from multiple industries found that 62.4% reported that they were helped by their company to have a positive balance while 37.6% said they were hindered.

Sue Klinck, chief people officer at Hall & Partners, says that hybrid working has helped build a ‘community’ feel at the firm, and has been heavily influenced by the pandemic. At Hall & Partners, office-based working averages about two days a week, but is planned on an ad-hoc basis around team and business needs.

“The pandemic has blurred the lines between work and home; while it has allowed more focused time to be productive, for example removing time spent commuting, it can also make it easier not to switch off, leading to meeting overload and Teams fatigue,” Klinck notes. “It has, however, helped us be more output-driven, focusing on the quality of the work people do, rather than the amount of time worked.”

Covid-19 was, in many cases, a catalyst for work/life changes already in progress. As home working has become more common, Andy Crysell, founder and chief executive at Crowd DNA, says boundaries have become a big issue, with work and home life increasingly bleeding into one. “Boundaries need protecting that bit more when you are suddenly working from home,” he says. “It is important that I and other senior management show the right way around boundaries. It is [about] having an open policy where people feel comfortable saying if those boundaries are being trespassed on.”

Crysell says it is also important that clients are made aware of the company’s work/life balance policy and the impact of last-minute requests on the team. Any issues that arise as a result need to be dealt with in a proportional way, rather than entering into ‘red alert’ mode, he says. This policy of having boundaries especially applies when working across multiple countries or time zones. There is a balance to be struck between collaborating with staff in teams from other countries and avoiding too much work at antisocial hours. Crysell adds that it is important to set projects up correctly – know who calls on whom when, and to try to avoid last-minute requests at inappropriate hours.

Helping with the unexpected

Work/life balance is not just about emails at unsociable hours or hybrid and flexible working. Sometimes it is about having policies in place so that employees know when life should take precedence over work, and underlining their rights to time off.

Employee-owned research firm Traverse is one company that has devised a more modern set of policies for employee leave, centred on common life events. The benefits include enhanced paternity and adoption leave to match maternity leave, five days of paid emergency leave for carers, 10 days’ bereavement leave, and support for staff going through the fostering selection and fertility treatment and donation processes. The company has also introduced a group health cash plan and is developing support packages for employees experiencing the menopause or undergoing gender transition. New starters will have access to a childcare deposit loan, and a support package will be available for workers experiencing a family breakdown, or violence and abuse.

Kerrie Gemmill, operations director at Traverse, says a previous support package was “a little bit traditional” and the company, following consultation with staff, wanted something that better reflected the modern family. “Especially when working in a hybrid way, you can’t just shut the door and leave life behind,” she says. “We are all living life, and we all have people’s backs and support them when life gets a little bit tough.”

This needs to be led by managers and the senior leadership team, adds Gemmill. “It is about demonstrating behaviours of when to contact people, how to support people better, how to encourage people to take time off and how to ensure people have a workload they can cope with. You will never get behaviour change through a policy.”

Crysell says “personalisation” is Crowd DNA’s approach when it comes to work/life balance. He defines the term as understanding what else is important to staff – for instance, family, location, other interests – and trying to be cognisant of and receptive to that, and tailoring approaches to meet individual needs. “A lot of the things that make our work brilliant to people – it is ad hoc, fast moving, high stakes, lots of different challenges, clients and time zones – are also things that make work challenging and can create burnout,” he says. “We can’t ignore that. That’s our starting point.”

This could even mean working abroad, or perhaps a temporary departure from the business. “If someone has a burning passion – say they want to go away for three months and make an album – we can factor that in,” says Crysell. “We acknowledge we have to do that. We talk about having a ‘future of work’ strategy, and how we create the right environment for the next generation of cultural strategists and researchers, and it will be different to that which worked for previous generations.

“Keep communicating. Get to personalisation. If you can’t make personalisation work, at least have options for people. Don’t just think of things in your terms and from your perspective – think in terms of the next generation of talent and who you want to have in your business.”

This article was first published in the October 2022 issue of Impact.