Sticking points

People tend to say this about places like New York City, and for some companies, work-life balance has the similar push-pull of something they’d rather avoid. Despite all the research and discussion surrounding the topic, job stress and burnout continue to plague Canadian workers. If anything, these organizational scourges are more acute than ever, with balance eluding all but a privileged few.

“There’s definitely a disconnect,” says Allan Smofsky, senior health and welfare consultant at Towers Perrin. “Organizations know about work-life balance and create mechanisms to promote it. yet when you survey employees, they say they don’t have balance and don’t have family-friendly policies contentment.” Rising stress and mental health figures attest to this imbalance. Why can’t the two groups meet halfway? And will the average employee ever achieve the long-sought balance?

Scenes from a struggle
Corporate sprawl could be one reason for employees’ continuing struggle. Karen Seward, senior vice-president of business development and marketing for Shepell-fgi, points to the mergers and acquisitions that have spread organizations across several continents. “You come home from work, and someone is sending you e-mails from another part of the globe where it’s morning,” she says. “Business through the various time zones can pull you into a merry-go-round of e-mail discussions and teleconferences.” For employees, these pressures translate to high levels of stress and imbalance. Current downsizing trends also leave many workers with one-and-a-half jobs to fit into a one-job timeslot, she adds. “That’s stress waiting to happen.”

To appreciate the value of work-life balance, it helps to look at the shadow cast by its mirror image: work-life conflict. Health Canada defines the umbrella term as a composite of role overload, work-to-family interference (work getting in the way of family responsibilities), family-to-work interference (family getting in the way of work responsibilities) and caregiver strain.

In a 2001 survey led by Carleton University business professor Linda Duxbury, 58% of respondents reported high levels of work overload—a 10% increase over the 1991 figure—while only 12% rated their work overload as low. Having quantified the impact of work overload on attendance, Duxbury and her colleagues concluded that employers could decrease absenteeism by 24.2% by eliminating high overload. The “struggle to juggle” also affects attendance: employees reporting high stress from balancing work and family life miss 7.2 days per year—exactly twice as many as those without this stressor. With the cost of recruiting and training a new hire estimated at one to three times the candidate’s annual salary, the higher turnover associated with work-life conflict can put a further dent in the bottom line.

Then there’s the cost of presenteeism—showing up at work in body, but not in spirit—to consider. “It starts to happen when workers feel overextended and undervalued,” says Michelle Knudson, coordinator of occupational health services with St. Joseph’s Care Group in Thunder Bay, Ont. “It’s a huge financial drain, reportedly up to 50% higher than the cost of absenteeism.” The cost of work-life conflict becomes still more apparent when tracing the path from job stress to short- or long-term disability, which can inflate payroll costs by up to 12%.

Raising voices
“For the past five years, we’ve been focusing on gathering evidence, and it’s now irrefutable,” says Nora Spinks, president of Work Life Harmony Enterprises, a Toronto-based consulting company. “Healthy people make healthy profits. Lower stress means fewer mistakes. Better balance leads to a stronger commitment to an organization,” she says.

With the business case for work-life balance stronger than ever, why do organizations still struggle to achieve it? “It comes down to creating the will,” says Spinks, who sees it as a three-pronged challenge. “First there’s the ethical prong,” she explains. “Leaders must think it’s the right thing to do. Second, the voice of the employee must become louder and louder, whether through labour disruption, quitting, or taking stress leaves. Third, market competition will put pressure on companies wanting to attract and retain the best talent.”

Unlike their baby boomer and Gen-X predecessors, Gen-Y employees are starting to speak in that “loud voice” that Spinks advocates. “I recently heard about a young employee getting up and walking out of a meeting, because the manager was spewing off about putting in the hours and the face time,” says Smofsky. “The employee was getting the job done, on his terms—all that rhetoric meant nothing to him. We need to take our cue from these younger people.”

Above all, stakeholders agree, buy-in must start at the senior management level. That’s what the Conference Board of Canada concluded in an executive briefing following a 2008 leadership summit: “The transformation of health and safety starts at the top—with the chief executive officer and other senior leaders.”

This begs the question: how can we convince those senior leaders? “We need to put it in the right terms,” says Seward. “Instead of talking about the benefits of work-life balance, we need to address the cost of ignoring it. [Senior managers] don’t want to hear about one more training program. If we show them what it costs when an employee misses work twice a month, every month, or that mental illness costs them half a million dollars per year, they’ll listen.” Smofsky concurs. “If we can isolate, say, lower engagement within a department and correlate it to business metrics like customer satisfaction and loyalty, the light bulb goes on.”

Beyond facts and figures, company leaders respond to inspirational stories, says Sinden Malinowski, health and wellness program manager at Pacific Blue Cross. “CEOs understandably hesitate to take what they perceive as organizational risks,” she points out. “If we can show them a clear path to success—a real company that did X and achieved Y—it might tip the scales for them.”

Good things, small packages
The fact remains, CEOs may associate work-life balance with complex initiatives that detract from the business of production. “It doesn’t need to be a tangled process,” Alaina MacKenzie, director of disability management at Medavie Blue Cross, maintains. “Small wins can have a huge impact on employees.” A case in point: Paul Foley, director of private health at Shoppers Drug Mart, knows of an organization in which all employees get a paid day off on their birthday. “Such small things can do wonders to boost morale,” he says.

The perception that work-life balance costs a pretty penny also needs to change, says Spinks. “Respect is a cornerstone of work-life harmony and costs nothing,” she says. How best to show this respect? “Give reasonable explanations rather than arbitrary commands, and recognize that employees are human beings with a life outside of work,” Spinks advises, adding that “respect also means listening.” It sounds simple enough, but consider that only 14% of respondents to a recent Desjardins Financial Security survey felt they could talk about work-life balance issues with their supervisors.

To counteract this reticence, “we have to make the leap to evaluating people on outcomes rather than hours worked,” says Smofsky. “Sure, employees may need to work longer and harder at certain times of the year or before a deadline, but it should be on their terms.” Doug Smeall, an assistant vice-president in Sun Life Financial’s group benefits division, has seen this principle in action. “I needed a report from one of my employees and asked her if we could meet at 5 p.m. to work through it,” he recalls. “She told me she was going rock climbing at that time and would have the work done by the time I arrived the next morning. I got to work the next day and there was the report. She’s got it figured out.”

The right fit
Unreasonable or inflexible work loads aside, work-life conflict may reflect a poor fit between employee and position, says MacKenzie. “People tend to get overwhelmed when they’re not in the right role,” she notes. For someone who likes routine, for example, “a sales and marketing position may be a very poor fit.” Smofsky suggests that employers think long and hard about “fit” both when hiring and promoting their staff. “We’re constantly seeing star performers getting promoted to management, then being miserable and underperforming,” he says.

Job descriptions may also need fine-tuning. “It’s widely known that employees start to burn out when demand exceeds control and when effort exceeds reward,” says Spinks. “Employers would do well to build some control and reward into every position, even the most menial ones. It’s cheap and effective.”

Control comes from having options, notes Spinks, citing “scheduling, location, time resources and physical resources” as potential realms of employee control. In her 2003 report on work-life conflict, Duxbury lists several ways of handing control to employees: allowing them to refuse overtime at no cost to their careers, allowing them to substitute time off for overtime payments and offering “cafeteria” benefit packages that employees can tailor to their evolving needs. By the same token, Duxbury encourages employers to “tangibly reward and recognize overtime work.”

In other countries, such flexibility is enshrined in the law. In the Netherlands, the Adjustment of Hours Law enables Dutch employees to request shorter or longer working hours—without having to provide a reason for their request. The U.K., meanwhile, has enacted legislation giving parents the right to make flexible working arrangements. Canadian employers need not wait for the law to catch up with best practice, however. “We already have the tools and we know they work,” notes Smofsky. “Now it’s just a matter of deployment.”

Gabrielle Bauer is a freelance writer in Toronto.

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© Copyright 2009 Rogers Publishing Ltd. This article first appeared in the January/Feburary 2009 edition of WORKING WELL magazine.