Articles
Presentation at National Work/Life Benchmarking Conference
"A Business View of How Organisations are Handling the Work/Life Issue"
by Gina McColl
Section editor (Innovation) - BRW
Presented at the Work/Life Conference conducted by Managing Work|Life Balance May 2007
I'm focusing on the media reporting of work-life balance issues in my presentation today, because that is the area of my expertise - apart, that is, from being a working mother of two who tries to do a five-day job in three days.
Barbara and Erica game my slot in today's conference the pretty impressive title of "An Authoritative business view of the way organisations are managing this issue." My authority as a journalist comes from reading lots of research and talking to lots of businesses about what they do and report on them. But working in the media, you also get an expertise in watching public debates gain momentum - and lose it. So I thought what I'd do today was reflect on how work-life balance is reported in the media, and how that's changed over recent years.
I've written about issues to do with workplace cultures, management, HR and work/life balance since 2003. In that year, BRW had two sections that covered topics like this: a Managing section and a Living Well section, of which I was the editor.
Fast forward to 2007, and BRW's Managing section has been rebadged as leadership, while Living Well -and its specific area of focus, on the human aspect of working life and workplace culture - on stress, health, relationships - has been axed altogether. I have gone from being the editor of the Living Well section - a name inspired by the phrase Living Well is the Best Revenge - to being the editor of Innovation, THE buzz word in business right now, which encompasses everything from research and development and intellectual property to lateral and continuous improvement in business processes. I still cover work/life balance issues as part of innovation - thanks to high quality research by people like Barbara Holmes and Erica Edmands who track what companies are doing. But the coverage has gone from being weekly to maybe quarterly at most.
What this small example shows you is exactly how long the media's attention span is when it comes to hot-button, barbecue-stopper issues like work/life balance. In two years, it has gone from being the subject of a dedicated section to an incidental area that is covered only occasionally. What changed? Is business understanding of work/life balance now so comprehensive and sophisticated that they are no longer interested in reading case studies and how-to's and the latest research?
This may confirm many of your prejudices about the media: that it is only interested in novelty and frequently fails to cover the nuances of sustained debates. Well, I'd agree with you a fair bit on that. But in this case, I think that it's not just the media that's lost interest. Work/life balance is a debate that's lost momentum in my opinion.
And it's not just my opinion. In my reading of the data in this year's benchmarking survey, business is becoming more starkly divided between the haves and the have-nots. A gulf is appearing between those who have run and improved their WLB initiatives over a number of years versus those who are belatedly getting started.
The results speak volumes. Fifty-four per cent of best-practice organisations - those who have been doing it for years - say that work-life balance strategies have helped them reduce turnover by an average of 15 per cent. But on the other hand, only 20 per cent of organisations who have just started to address work-life balance say such initiatives have helped them reduce turnover, and then by half as much - an average of only 7 per cent.
The inverse is also true. Thirty-six per cent of organisations new to work-life balance initiatives say staff have left because of a lack of flexibility, compared to only 2% in best-practice organisations. Employee engagement measures also show the disparity: 79% of best-practice organisations report a positive impact on productivity, compared to 20% of early-stagers.
If the business case for introducing improved work-life balance practices is so compelling, what is the explanation for this gulf, this loss of momentum in the WLB movement?
My hypothesis is that one reason is the lack of any meaningful legislative or political agenda. Its simply not being pushed by either of the major political parties in a sustained way, despite Prime Minster Howard's infamous comment back in 2002 that the issue was a barbecue stopper, and his recent hints that he would like to do more for the so-called "sandwich generation", those caught between the competing demands of work, and the needs of their children and ageing parents. At the last election when Family First's Steve Fielding won what was potentially the balance of power in the Senate, and got a commitment form the Howard government that all new policies would be accompanied by a Family Impact Statement, it looked like issues of balance might be held up to serious and sustained scrutiny, but this promise has simply been ignored.
But the lack of political will is only half the story. If there were real community pressure for this, wouldn't politicians feel bound to react?
The lack of a lobby group for work-life balance is a strange phenomenon, because these issues effect us all. That sounds like a motherhood statement, but it's true. WLB is a touchy-feely title for the consequence of an economic revolution: women entering the workforce in large numbers, accompanied by an increase in working hours and those of commercial operations.
Respected labour economist Barbara Pocock, argues that the loss of balance in our lives is because our prevailing workplace model is still based on the myth of the careless worker. The careless worker sounds like an occupational health and safety gag, but its not: rather, it refers to the worker with no caring responsibilities. No ageing parents. No small children with constant lingering ailments and an inability to sleep through the night - and if you think that sounds like a complaint rather than a disinterested observation, you'd be right. No busted tap that requires a plumber - and someone to let them in. The ideal worker is someone, in short, with a "wife" who can attend to all these things.
This economic revolution - the huge number of women entering the workforce - is one of the reasons work-life balance is often seen as a female issue. But while there is no doubt that caring responsibilities still fall disproportionaly on women, work-life balance is out-of-kilter for almost everyone: the young, the old, men and women, straight, gays and lesbians, the wealthy and the poor. The economic revolution has not been accompanied by any shift in out-of-work unpaid labour. If anything, it has intensified as people live longer, more people live in single-person households, and so on.
Job intensification, the rise in shiftwork to accommodate 24/7 commercial operations, the long hours culture - these things are all related to the same economic revolution. And they also threaten our ability to maintain our sustaining personal relationships and interests. Work life balance isn't just about burdensome cares: its also abut fun stuff. Having quality time, as they say, with partners, family, intimates, having time to pursue further study, play sport, or pursue whatever interest you might have the provide you with "balance."
Meanwhile, lack of balance is associated with many of the things we view as the ills of modern life: stress, alcohol abuse, relationship breakdown and depression to name a few.
So if it affects us all, why isn't there a "movement" around work-life balance, a popular lobby group with a slogan, a spokesperson and a website? The answer of course is economic. None of us is care-free, but we all experience our difficulties as individuals, we are atomized in our juggling of work and life. In my conversations with colleagues and peers, we swap war stories and tips about managing stress and trying to find efficiencies. Doing the supermarketing online. Hiring a cleaner versus lowering your standards. After school care versus latchkey kids. And so on. If there was a solution that could be packaged up and sold to solve this dilemma, there would be a lobby group around it, just as there is for all the other capital I Issues that lob on to my desk every other week. Obesity. Diabetes. Sleep. Stress. Depression. They all have well-funded research showing the cost to business and the economy of these underdiagnosed or over-presenting conditions. Because they all have commercial interests who will benefit from increased media awareness, popular attention and, ultimately, political will.
Look at the way the growing commercial interest in nuclear energy combined with the release of the Stern report on climate change. This is the starkest example of this phenomenon that has occurred in the past 12 months. The report was really was the tipping point in this country, if not around the world, for its elevation to the number one public policy issue, and the reason it was able to convert the Howard government and big and small-business skeptics to climate change converts - or realists, as they say - is because its focus was on economic issues.
In the past, there had always been a ethical/moral centre to the climate change debate and the activism around the issue. Now leadership was coming from business hard-heads like IAG's Michael Hawker.
I can't think of the equivalent debate leaders in the work-life balance area. Anne Sherry? Pru Goward? Mark Latham, for all his other sins, was an advocate, and maybe the best thing you can say abut him in the obituary of his contribution to public life is that at least he went off and practiced what he preached and went off to be the primary carer of his two kids. But they are all advocates whose belief in the issue is partly motivated by a commitment to equity, to fairness - to the ethical dimension of the WLB issue.
Business is always sceptical about embracing ethical issues. The business of business is business as they say.
In a recent interview I did with Stevan Bevan, the director of research at the British think-tank the Work Foundation he argued this:
The ethical/moral argument for WLB has never been decisive or persuasive with the business community. I think that there are two compelling economic arguments. First, demographic change and a tightening of the labour market will mean that employee demand for flexibility will grow significantly. Employers who want to get & retain the best staff will need to respond to this. Second, customer demand to 24/7 access to more personalised services will place businesses under more pressure to find ways of resourcing themselves flexibly. The old, 'provider-led' approach to customer service will no longer be acceptable. Flexibility of staff deployment & scheduling will be imperative to be competitive.
The trouble with this view to me is that is sees flexibility as only a matter of competitive advantage. So what if market conditions changed? What if consumer demands changed again, or what about when there is a downturn and the labour market becomes less tight. Would business start to wind-back its flexible work practices? Would this be okay?
That's why I would argue there is an ethical dimension to why business should offer flexibility, and why there is a role for government in underwriting that flexibility.
Now I know that talking about mandated flexibility makes a lot of people very nervous. So there is one more point I am eager to make, which is this: I think one of the problems with the phrase work-life balance is that it implies that the two things, work and life are polar opposites, that work is the enemy of life. And I would argue that this is entirely false.
According to a wide range of work-quality, life-quality stress research, it is not work causes stress, it is jobs. People love their work but too often they hate their jobs. Business people who embrace WLB initiatives - I suspect most of the people in this room - know that improving flexibility really means rethinking job design. The changes that often need to be made are minimal and low cost. They are as much changes in mindset and culture as anything else.
People are happy in their jobs when they feel they have some control of their working lives. This is demonstrated over and over again in research. They are also more productive, and more likely to stay in their jobs. But my argument this morning is that while these commercial outcomes are important, the pursuit of happiness in the workplace is also an important goal in itself.
It's fascinating to think who would be the Sir Nicholas Stern of the work-life balance debate. Any suggestions?
My cheeky suggestion is that it might be Melanie Howard, the Prime Minister's daughter. British academic Dr Lynda Gratton from the London Business School says flexibility is something too many CEO's fundamentally don't get because they do have "wives". The crucial light bulb moment for them is when they have clever daughters, who they see graduate form Oxford and then struggle with families and a job. "Then the light bulb goes on," as she puts it. It was hard for me not to indulge in a little fantasy psychologising when I heard the 67 year old Prime Minister last month talk about the needs of the so-called "sandwich generation."
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