By Margaret Adams, work-life balance consultant and writer
We hear a lot about work-life balance these days. Stories about flexible working, family friendly policies, people wanting to work fewer hours and the desire of workers to improve their work-life balance are regularly in the news. We hear less about how introducing the work-life balance agenda improves an organisation’s profitability – how it impacts on the bottom line, infact.
Many organisations introducing work-life balance do so to help their staff improve their personal work-life balance, which is a noble aspiration. However, until work-life balance is also seen in the context of helping an organisation to succeed it will almost certainly remain on the periphery of managerial concerns.
Being nice to people is great, but profit, survival and growth always seem to have a greater priority when it comes to the allocation of resource.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
Work-life balance is about business improvement and helping organisations to achieve what they set out to do just as much as it is about helping individuals to achieve the right work-life balance for them.
The work-life balance agenda presents a set of enabling people management strategies to organisations everywhere.
Win-win management
Work-life balance strategies can help individuals and organisations to be more productive it is not a skivers’ charter but a means of enhancing business performance.
So when you are thinking about introducing these initiatives in your organisation consider the benefits:
- for your organisation
- for your staff
People themselves will tell you about what they want to achieve through a work-life balance programme: more control over their lives not just their working lives.
It’s not that difficult to find business issues to support the introduction of work-life balance. The most common of these include:
Problems with recruitment and retention
If you fail to attract and retain the best people could it be that your organisation isn’t a very nice place to work? If employees talk about their heavy workloads and long hours, prospective recruits will shun you causing staffing issues.
You need to consider how can you achieve your targets in an increasingly competitive global market place with an over-worked, demoralised and unhappy workforce and if using the work-life balance agenda to address this issue will deliver business benefits.
Problems with absenteeism
If you have inflexible working practices there is a good chance that absenteeism is higher than it would be if people had more control over their attendance patterns and hence over their work-life balance. It’s not just childcare issues that cause people to take time out of work.
One person in three over the age of 45 is a carer and the Work Foundation estimates that up to 10 million people over the next twenty years will be caring for an elderly relative. Many workplaces help their staff to cope with both components of their lives by introducing flexible working, enabling people to juggle their responsibilities more effectively. This, in turn encourages staff retention and loyalty. Where do you stand on flexible working? Is it a benefit to your organisation or a nuisance?
Problems with productivity
On the surface it seems great if people put in lots of extra unpaid hours. People in the UK work longer hours than elsewhere in Europe.
According to UNISON one man in three works more than 50 hours per week. There are also growing numbers of people working more than 60 hours per week.
However, as early as 1916 government reports stated that productivity actually drops where excessive hours are worked, sometimes to lower levels than if no overtime at all had been worked. Accidents are more likely to happen and people are more likely to suffer from high levels of occupational stress than are workers in jobs where the workload is more manageable.
It should come as no surprise to learn that once organisations begin to see the business benefits of work-life balance they often focus on strategies for tackling the long hours culture because dealing with this issue is central to success in the work-life balance arena. So where do you stand on the long hours issue? What are you doing to make sure people are not asked to work longer and longer hours?
Work-life balance and the bottom line
For work-life balance to improve business performance, people need a realistic and manageable workload and attendance patterns which enable them to deal with all their responsibilities in both components of their lives.
They may need help from their employer when they face crises at home or at work, so when an organisation decides to introduce a work-life balance strategy it is most likely to turn first to flexible working.
Flexible working strategies
Flexible working is also important because this is an area where government has been most active in promoting the work-life balance agenda. The Employment Act 2002 brought in the right to request to work flexibly and the right to have requests considered seriously for specific groups of workers.
When considering the introduction or extension of flexible working in your organisation, rather than focusing on the problems associated with changes to employment practices think about the wider pool of talent made available by introducing flexible working. With skills shortages beginning to bite in many industry sectors this is a valuable business benefit of adopting a work-life balance culture.
Think about how the various flexible working strategies: annualised hours, term-life working, home working, compressed working hours, job-sharing, voluntary reduced time and such approaches as career and responsibility breaks can enhance your business as well as helping the people who work for you to improve their work-life balance.
Introduce these strategies to help to create that win-win situation: enhanced productivity for the organisation, better work-life balance for the employees.
Focus on the business issues as well as on helping your staff when you next consider work-life balance initiatives. You are likely to find that the work-life balance agenda offers a valuable approach to managing people even more effectively.
Margaret Adams is the author of The Work-Life Balance Trainer’s Manual She can be contacted at: mail@TheAdamsConsultancy.co.uk Tel: 01494 791045
