Susanne Tietze MA MBA PhD of Nottingham Trent Business School examines current thinking on the work-life balance issues. Getting the balance right between work and an outside life can be difficult, but a successful balance can bring enormous rewards for the business and can improve the quality of life for workers. This article was provided by our sister site, Accountingweb.

The ‘work-life balance’ debate has become a hot topic in public and private discussions. The most prominent recent survey was commissioned by the DfEE and reported a high level of support for this balance, from both employees and employers. A majority of employers recognised that the work-life balance brings benefits to their businesses such as improved commitment from employees.

At the same time, many employers also recognise that there were costs in doing so, such as increasing managerial workloads. Employees are said to benefit in terms of increased autonomy, greater flexibility in timing their tasks, being able to fulfil work and domestic commitments as well as becoming more effective due to the lack of commuting as well as to the increase in uninterrupted work time. Thus, it seems that mostly everyone can achieve some benefits through programmes based on such a work-life balance approach.

In many regards my own work as a researcher and consultant bears out such findings. However, there seem to be some issues that are usually not part of discussion on the work-life balance and that do not inform mainstream thinking, but that nevertheless figure largely in the individual and organisational lives that I explore. Let me begin with some ‘semantic musing’.

The ‘work – life balance’ is a curious expression, implying that there is a irreconcilable difference between ‘work’ and ‘life’; that the two are indeed two separate things, that we either are in a state of ‘work’, in which case we are not ‘alive’ or that when we are in a state of ‘being alive’, we are definitely not ‘working’. At best, so it is suggested in this hapless expression, we might be able to ‘balance’ the two. However, we know that balance is a precarious state: it never lasts, is only temporary and most of the time we can only try to strive for it, but eventually it remains an unsustainable utopian state of harmony.

The above musings are not meant to diminish the importance and merits of the debate on balancing work and life, but rather try to reformulate the questions that are entailed in it. Thus important questions about the importance of paid work vis-à-vis unpaid work, about the value of time, about the importance of relationships is raised.

Furthermore, difficult decisions about when to say “enough is enough” (I have spent enough time in the office this week, I need to see my family. Do we really need a bigger car, a bigger house, haven’t we got enough?) can be articulated and addressed within this debate. It is in this respect, that the work-life balance debate acts as an enabler to ask pertinent questions, in that it empowers people to express their concerns and worries within a legitimate framework. It is for those reasons that the work-life balance debate provides a forum for reflective and critical discussion of issues that confront individuals and employers alike.

Exploring the work-life balance
In my research and consultancy work with management professionals and/or their employers I have invariably found that the following themes are recurrent in the problems and dilemmas that individuals and employers face when trying to renegotiate the relationship between ‘work’ and ‘life’. It seems that in particular working at home for some time of the working week brings to the fore such questions as described above, because the simultaneous existence of ‘work’ and ‘home’ necessitates some realignment between the two.

Individual managers, who worked from home regularly, wanted to kill two birds with one stone. They wanted to become more effective, through intense periods of uninterrupted work, which they never got when working at the traditional office base. However, they often also wanted to become more involved with their families, in particular if young children were around, or engage more with their social circles or within their respective communities.

Surprisingly, this was the case not just for female managers, but also for male managers. In one case a young father – and a qualified accountant, too – gave up a promotion possibility, which would have required him to work faster, harder and be at the traditional office a lot more. In his case the balance between ‘work’ and ‘life/home’ had indeed become subject to change in that home responsibilities become prioritised, possibly temporarily, over work responsibilities and ambitions.

Frequently, the management professionals I talk to report on how through working at home they became ‘drawn into a different world’, ‘discover a whole new side of life’ or ‘feel sucked into a different world’. Some find these experiences so enriching that they make concessions regarding their ambitions or future career plans (and certainly there are implications here for employers to be aware of). Often, these professionals ask me to make sure that they cannot be recognised, because they are very well aware that such views are anathema to conventional and wide spread expectations about what being a ‘true professional’ entails and they fear being perceived as ‘less professional’, as ‘having gone soft’ as ‘being less committed’.

In this regard they experience a contradiction between their employer’s rhetoric about work/life balance or similar flexibility or equal opportunities policies and more dominant cultural expectations and traditions within which such policies are invariably embedded.

However, not all my respondents cherished the experience of working at home. Boredom and loneliness, lack of involvement and stimulation are frequently reported side effects of working at home, as is a perceived loss of status in that highly trained professionals usually enjoy greater kudos at the traditional work place than as in the home environment, where different skills count!

Also, the myth that the family is the peaceful haven to its conflict-ridden antidote, the workplace, needs to be debunked. Families are – to use a sociological phrase – ‘greedy institutions’ that demand undivided loyalty and commitment from their members. Quite a few of the teleworkers felt themselves involuntarily involved in their families to an extent that some of them renegotiated with their employers a return to more conventional working patterns at their traditional office base.

From the employment organisation’s point of view, working at home/teleworking arrangements formed part of wider flexibility programmes. They were driven by the genuine desire to be a ‘good employer’ and accommodate the different needs and requirements of an increasingly diverse workforce. Thus, such programmes were implemented to attract and retain core staff, to sustain good morale amongst the workforce and to increase overall organisational effectiveness as well as to comply with good practice as defined by industry standards.

Practical difficulties reported from those who have to manage such flexibility related to communication problems managing absences, but also to capturing the knowledge and experience of those staff that regularly, increasingly and frequently are absent from the traditional office base.

Managers described this as a particular problem, because they found that passing on the myriad of experience through office banter, lunch conversations or quick chats in-between this task and the next become more fragmented and disrupted. Organizations thrive on oral traditions; interrupting such traditions bears consequent problems. One should not underestimate how much knowledge is ‘mute’, in that it is not written down or otherwise accessible and can only be passed on orally and informally. One manager who had to manage such frequent absences talked at length at the frustration of having such knowledge not available and ‘present in a really existing body’.

Frequently, I found that managers found it difficult to let go of a ‘control approach’ and that they sometimes felt that one of their core activities (of managing and controlling people) become eroded. Not all of them appreciated the need to develop different ways of relating to the professional staff. However, as one manager put it ‘Finally, we have reached a state were we are almost forced to trust our staff. We’ve always talked about it, now we’ve got to practice it’.

What to do?
Many organisations and individuals are playing with the idea of flexible work with a view to better balance ‘work’ and ‘life’. For those who do, the most practical advice I can give is not to launch into blind action without thinking! The thinking should concern itself with questions centred on the deeper reasons of one’s actions. From the employer’s perspective, questions could entail: ‘why are we introducing flexibility/teleworking programmes?’, ‘what are our expectations from our (core) staff?’, ‘would our culture actually support or hinder new flexibility initiatives?’, ‘is there a marked difference between our rhetoric and our realities?’

From the individual’s perspective similar questions could be asked: ‘why do I want to be part of this?’, ‘will it affect myself as well as my family?’, ‘will there be practical and moral support in the office?’ ‘what is the culture of my organisation and will my stake in it be affected?’

In the organisations I worked with and which successfully established flexible or work/life balance programmes, such organisational and individual questions did not remain separate from each other, but were discussed in an open dialogue. Organisations used discussion or focus groups to clarify the individual – organisation relationship and discussed their perspectives; they sought feedback and were prepared to act on such provided feedback. The organisations that seemed to struggle with such flexibility programmes were those that were driven purely instrumentally, the main reason being to cut back on estate costs. Similarly, purely instrumentally driven individuals – the main reason was here not to have to commute – found it sometimes more difficult to accommodate ‘work’ into their ‘homes’.

Work– ife: redefining the relationship
With regard to the topic of this column, the work-life balance, it appears to me that the achievement of such a balance requires both individuals and employment organisation to rethink and redefine what their mutual relationship is going to look like.

In some cases this might entail quite a radical redefinition between what matters, what counts and, in the long run, of how one wants to live one’s organisational and private life. Based on the consultancy work and the research I have done on this topic, I believe the biggest challenge to be to create an environment in which it is ‘sayable’ and considered to be ‘legitimate’ to say what and where the boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘life/home’ actually are and how they are to be established. And, what is more, one should be able to say so without fear of recrimination and from suffering organisational sanctions.

To create such a culture is the responsibility of managers and leaders. They possess the required legitimacy and power to challenge the culture of presenteeism and long hours and to break with the – rather unfounded – myth that ‘more is always better’. I have come across many managers and ‘bosses’ that tried very hard to instil such an ethos in their respective organisation.

Frequently, they did so by providing an example themselves – such as the female Head of Department who rejected any attempts of Friday afternoon meetings by referring to her family commitments and by saying: ‘It is a commonly known secret that I do not work Friday afternoons’. Or by the male boss who ensured that his teleworking staff were kept informed about everything that went on in their absence and who tried to create a ‘culture, at least in my unit, where people are seen as whole people with a life outside this organisation’.

These managers are quite courageous people, indeed, I would say they are leaders, because they allow change into organisation: They do so by breaking taboos and risk some ridicule of fellow managers or being frowned upon by their seniors. May I point out that their actions did not result in mayhem, but that it created commitment, genuine respect and good will in their departments.

Conclusion
The debate of how to balance work and life is, while a somewhat clumsy expression, of contemporary importance, because at its core is the question of ‘how to life one’s live’. This is not a superfluous philosophical question, but touches on the very processes of organizing and managing, that form part of our daily experience of work organizations. This debate goes far beyond the notion of managing flexibly and should therefore not be positioned either ‘here’ in the Human Resource Departments or ‘there’ in the private realm, but needs to come together in instructive public discourse.

SUSANNE TIETZE

Susanne Tietze MA MBA PhD is a Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Comparative Management at the Nottingham Trent Business School, The Nottingham Trent University. She is an experienced teacher, researcher and consultant in the field of organisational communication and cultural processes.

Currently, her research focusses on the implications of telework on both organisations and employees and their households. She publishes regularly in academic and practitioner journals. Her first book (Tietze S, Cohen L and Musson G, Understanding Organisations through Language, London Sage) is forthcoming in early 2003.