Happiness is in the balance
By Josh Jennings | theage.com.au | 09 May
The pace people are expected to work in their designated hours is changing as organisations become capable of completing work faster.
The right work-life mix is beneficial to employers and employees alike.
Carting the baby to work, leaving the office on time, sharing your job and taking the day off for your birthday might raise eyebrows in some workplaces but not at PR company WordStorm, according to managing director Monica Rosenfeld.
As a mother of two young children, she says she has an empathetic outlook on the strain the workplace can have on family life. "I don't think people should have to choose between focusing 100 per cent on career and focusing 100 per cent on children," she says.
"I think it's important for employers to be creative about how they can introduce opportunities so employees can have the best of both worlds."
Rosenfeld believes one of the biggest obstacles the workplace creates is the potential to damage the bond between a parent and child.
More than 50 per cent of respondents to the University of South Australia's 2008 Australian Work and Life Index said they felt their jobs interfered with their activities outside of work. The results also showed mothers and fathers had poorer work-life balance than non-parents.
The director of Workplace Training Advisory Australia and the National Leadership Institute, Brendan Farrell, says organisations aspiring to create family-friendly workplaces fail when they adhere to one-size-fits-all approaches.
"Whilst employee-friendly strategy should be planned according to the unique needs of an organisation, it must have the commitment and support of the most senior leaders to succeed," he says. "A common thread among award-winning family-friendly organisations is the presence of an influential leader who takes a proactive interest in the process."
Census figures from 2007 show that 1.2 million Australian men and close to 400,000 women report working more than 49 hours a week. But according to an academic at the Australian National University's national centre for epidemiology and population health, Dr Lyndall Strazdins, the demands placed on employees' time in the past few decades have changed in other ways, too.
He says a consequence of the increasing casualisation of the Australian workforce is the increasing unpredictability of working time. The deregulation of working hours means employees (in retail, for example) who are working more non-standard hours are not necessarily compensated in the form of loadings and overtime; and the pace people are expected to work in their designated hours is changing as organisations become capable of completing work faster.
"It all comes together in how it affects families and family life," Strazdins says.
"If parents don't have predictable schedules, it makes it very hard to make care arrangements; if they're working mornings, evenings and nights, they're times usually reserved for family; intensification affects how parents feel their energy and mental health; and [working] long hours is, of course, the same thing as having unsociable hours it expands into family time, so families have to accommodate for that in some sort of way."
A 2007 Managing Work Life Balance International survey shows 96 per cent of "best practice" Australian employers implemented initiatives that focused on the health and wellbeing of employees in the prior 12 months but only 71 per cent of employers did the same. Strazdins says implementing these strategies is more challenging for some businesses than others.
"Particularly in a small business," she says. "It's not easy to sit down and think: 'How can I structure my workforce so that I can give my employees flexible work hours? How can I structure the work-loads of my employees so they can take work home if they need to?"'
Rosenfeld, who says WordStorm, which has nine employees, makes its decisions about creating a family-friendly workplace without external consulting, says the more effort and time the Government can devote to assisting small businesses to be family-friendly, the better.
In March this year, the Rudd Government launched the Fresh Ideas For Work And Family program, a national initiative that offers small businesses grants of between $5000 and $15,000 so they can implement practices to assist employees to juggle their work and family obligations and improve employee retention and productivity.
But Strazdins says there still needs to be a fundamental shift in the views of the Australian workplace if it is to become more family-friendly.
"We tend to see the economy and business as separate to society but they're all deeply connected, so the give and take is actually really critical," she says.
First published by TheAge.com.au on May 09 2009
Visit theage.com.au for the latest news updated throughout the day
