Exploring Work-Life Balance and How it’s Working Out
It’s a term which has become so ubiquitous that its fundamental meaning has almost been lost. Work-life balance certainly remains a key point of discussion, particularly in terms of recruitment. A 2023 Sage survey reports that 81% of 3,500 respondents identify balanced, flexible working as a top career priority. And yet, a separate 2023 survey in Medium, reports a pessimistic picture of WLB as an unattainable goal, calling ‘burnout’ a ‘silent epidemic’, experienced by more than 60% of UK workers. As a society, have we talked this concept to death? Has any progress actually been made? And when did workers start advocating for it in the first place?
In order to understand what we actually mean by this enigmatic utopia of “better work life balance” in 2024, it can be useful to establish the context from which this has arisen. Perhaps it is an innate aspect of the human condition to feel dissatisfied with our attempts to divide life neatly into time ‘on’ and time ‘off’. Possibly the Neanderthals were going back to their caves unable to switch off from their hunting and/or gathering responsibilities. Maybe scholars have misinterpreted hieroglyphics, and what they really say is, I really wish my employer would implement a 4 day working week so I can spend more time with family. After all, those pyramids certainly didn’t build themselves.
In the UK, the first attempt to impose some employee control over life balance can be tracked back to Tom Mann and the Social Democratic Federation’s 1884 pamphlet calling for the working day to be limited to eight hours. After significant strike and union action, this came to be a generally-accepted model for much of the British workforce, designating working hours according to a daily, weekly or monthly figure.
For the time being, even post-Brexit, UK regulations follow a weekly model, the EC Working Time Directive of 2003, but workers can voluntarily opt out of the 48-hour weekly limit. Many workers would argue that their contracted ‘working hours’ mean very little, in reality, and bare scant relation to their salary. To focus on professional services, the demands of this sector are, by nature, at the mercy of the clients’ needs; if a job needs to be done, the concept of an eight-hour day or a forty-eight hour week is redundant. And despite Tom Mann’s principle to shorten our hours to prolong our lives, it is overwhelmingly obvious that people who work long hours and respond flexibly to the business’s needs tend to get ahead.
Is this actually benefiting anyone though? Employers or employees? A 2014 Stanford study showed that productivity per hour declines sharply after the fifty-hour point. According to this research, published in the Harvard Business Review, working more than 55 hours per week is essentially pointless. Laura Vandercam has taken this numerical assessment further and argues that around thirty-eight hours per week, equivalent to 7.6 hours a day, is conducive to employees with the most positive, self-stated, life balance. So, Tom Mann had the right idea way back in the nineteenth-century? Let’s all join the Socialist Democratic Federation…
Is the solution a four day working week?
But, wait. Hasn’t the working world changed a wee bit in the last one hundred and forty years? Maybe it’s not about the reduced hours. Maybe it’s flexibility and the ability to work from home which truly make the biggest difference to WLB in the twenty-first century. Increasingly, businesses are turning to innovative solutions, albeit with mixed results. The World Economic Forum led a four day week six month pilot programme between June and December 2022, with more than sixty UK companies trialling this potentially groundbreaking resolution to the WLB conundrum. Surely, if employees had a 4:3 working week ratio rather than the traditional five day week, this would create space for life as well as work?
Perhaps predictably, this probably isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all solution. Four day weeks will work much better is some environments than others such as manufacturing where largely business hours are developed around production. It’s too early to assess the long-term success of this approach, as the vast majority of businesses in the pilot have not adopted a four day working week permanently. A question to ponder may be; Would employees ultimately find that, whilst they had one more day off in a four day week, the level of stress and expectation had only been condensed into their remaining working hours, making them even more susceptible to burnout? It’s hard to say. And of course this would depend on a host of factors, from role, to salary, to quality of life outside work, which cannot be flatlined to create an truly objective comparison.
Similarly, working from home (WFH), once touted as the crème-de-la-crème of WLB has now had its shine very much called into question. The impact of Covid, and our collective experience in working remotely, away from face-to-face interactivity, has taken its toll. In a post pandemic world, while WFH undeniably offers a balance, with more flexibility in opportunities to keep on top of school drop offs, pet needs, life admin, health and wellbeing, and time to pursue hobbies, the demands of the workplace are never more than a Teams call, message or email away. And for many, home, once the sanctuary of life, now becomes less of a safe space and actually part of the problem.
So the jury is still out – do we actually understand what constitutes to a better work life balance?
Overall, one thing which employees seem to have in common is the desire to be treated as individuals in the workplace rather than cogs in a machine. This is, clearly, much more difficult to measure or roll-out in pilot form, than a headline policy such as the four day working week or working from home, but could be the key to achieving a state of equilibrium, where employees feel valued at work and not caught between a rock and a hard place, full of guilt and declining mental health, trying to blend all parts of their life and feeling pulled in too many directions.
Being pulled in different directions isn’t a problem which only affects employees. Business owners and senior leaders are as susceptible to burnout and degrading mental health as anyone else; and with the responsibility, pressure and expectation these roles require, maybe significantly more so. As a search and recruitment partner, Blair West get a privileged insight into the life balance practices of a diverse range of businesses and we hear first-hand from senior business leaders how they are trying to affect change. If trust and flexibility are the key to healthy WLB it needs to be acknowledged that they are not always the answer by themselves. If every employee was super motivated and effective at managing their own productivity levels, running a business would be a much simpler task. Unfortunately, they’re not and it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the consternation this causes for employers, not to mention to adverse effect on their own work-life equilibrium.
The Sage survey, referenced at the start of this blog sets out some thought-provoking statements as well as statistics, echoing much of the feedback we get from clients and candidates. The article is available here to read in full, but a few pointers in take-away form, were that building a genuine WLB culture could be affected by:
- Leading by example. Where managers demonstrably leave the office on time, take breaks and refrain from emailing out of office hours comes a genuine shift in work/life leadership.
- Encouraging transparency in terms of workload. The further removed managers become from employees’ day-to-day tasks, the less they may appreciate how long a task actually takes. It sounds simple, but managers who listen to teams will understand the difference between busy and thriving vs busy and stressed.
- Recognising diversity. Companies may be able to attract high-quality candidates with gimmicks and slogans, but companies that retain effective workforces genuinely take on board that every employee is different and work hard to meet their needs. Rather than employees demanding better benefits or employers grudgingly conceding generic alterations to the standard of office-based contracted hours, recognising diversity means meeting in the middle with diverse solutions based on mutual trust and respect.
Who knows what life balance will look like in another hundred and forty years. Shorten our hours to prolong our lives may well be a redundant mantra if our very concepts of jobs and careers have been made obsolete by artificial intelligence. We may look back nostalgically at the days when our primary concerns were being contacted out of hours on our brick-like Blackberries in the 1990s or our struggles to use our homes as workspaces and stop the dog barking on Teams calls.
Call it what you want: balance, blending, navigation or integration. It’s a tough thing to achieve, for employers and employees, and an even tougher thing to maintain. But for all our benefits, work life balance is definitely worth talking about.
