Work-life balance: findings new ways to work

Work/life balance: findings new ways to work

(paper commissioned by PCS, Inland Revenue and TUC as part of the Our Time project for Inland Revenue staff seminars, Brighton and Worthing 15 October 2001)

By Dr Jane Pillinger

Work-life balance concerns

• The organisation of working life over the life course
• Time for caring and families
• Time for learning
• Time for ourselves
• Time for community/political participation
• Social, personal, economic and political time: a new politics of ‘time’

Negotiating a work/life balance can help enable parents (men and women) to reconcile their work with their family life and women in particular to participate in the labour market. It can also allows workers to take leave from the labour market so that they can participate in education or training or to take up an interest, hobby or leisure pursuit that interests them. This could mean playing roles in your local community and in politics or taking an education course to update your skills. It might mean that workers can reorganise their working lives and their working hours around shorter days, weeks, months or years.

Looking at working time in this way can help us take account of the different and diverse needs of different workers and at different stages in their lives. It can also be useful to help us do things differently: how we reorganise our workplaces, our local services, our cities… A key issue for many workers is flexible working time in order to have a work-life balance. A key issue for employers in the public services is how working time can be reorganised in order to extend the opening times of public services, sometimes to prevent services from being privatised or contracted out to other providers, and most importantly improve the quality of the service to citizens.

The Department for Education and Employment define work-life balance as:

'…adjusting work patterns so that everyone regardless of age, race or gender can find a rhythm that enables them more easily to combine work and their other responsibilities and aspirations'

There have been a number of experiments in working time in the UK and across Europe. Some are concerned with equal opportunities between women and men, others concern the need to provide workers with a change to take educational leave, and in others the experiments have been directly related to retaining existing jobs or creating new jobs at a time of relatively high unemployment.

Coupled with this are significant changes in work organisation. The full-time, five day a week, male model of continuous employment is now not so common and work has become more precarious. The increase in flexible work has production organised to time-match the demand for products and there is a corresponding increase in insecure flexible work, particularly of women's part-time work in the expanding service sector of the economy.

But there are ways in which employees choices about working time have become increasingly possible. In this new climate flexible working time allows for more choice to be given in the hours that are worked.

Changes in work organisation and working time alongside new forms of flexibility at work in the public services have linked local service improvements to user needs; the result has been some highly innovatory experiments in local areas, in municipalities and in the case of Italy in particular, across whole cities. These initiatives, which place new values on time, are some of the most exciting responses to the restructuring of work in recent years.

These issues are closely connected to some of the new thinking on working time and the social organisation of time, for instance, by introducing family-friendly working time policies or a work/life balance for all employees, redistributing work between men and women, or job creation through changing working time arrangements. We have seen women’s increased participation in the labour market, new social demands from men and women for more free time and a greater desire for employees to have control over their working time.

In many respects it has been the trade unions, particularly in the public sector in the Netherlands, Germany and the Nordic countries, with high levels of female membership, that have been proactive in developing new work-time strategies and in the process of modernisation have linked important welfare objectives to equal opportunities, choice or time sovereignty, quality of working life and job creation.

The restructuring and reduction of working time are particularly important in the public services in order to reduce unemployment, to regulate the nature and incidence of flexible work (part-time and temporary work), modernise and improve the quality of services, improve working conditions, and reduce stress and ill health associated with excessive working hours. Finally changing working time can enhance possibilities for leisure time, education and parental leave, equal opportunities and the sharing of family and work life. It is worth noting that developments in working time across Europe have been taking place at a time of, and in some cases in direct response to, budgetary restrictions in the public sector in all EU countries.

Let us now turn to look at some examples of experiments in work and time.

In summary these initiatives include:

• Redistribution of working time between full-time male hours and part-time female hours (Netherlands)
• Reduced working hours, the 35 hour week and working time solidarity (France)
• Parental leave and the father’s month in Sweden
• Part-time work policies (Netherlands and Sweden) and flexible retirement schemes (Germany)
• Paid leave schemes (Belgium, Finland and Denmark) and unpaid sabbatical schemes (Ireland)
• Job rotation (Belgium, Finland and Denmark)
• Flexible working hours: flexi time, job sharing, annualised hours, time banking etc

A key objective of working time policy is its potential to redistribute work in favour of women’s time-frames. In Sweden, Denmark and Norway this has led to strategies to maintain the full-time work norm, backed up by state-supported child and elder care, in order to resist trends towards involuntary part-time working. In contrast the Dutch approach, based on a part-time work led strategy for employment growth has emphasised the redistribution of work between full-time male employees and part-time female employees, with a particular emphasis on reducing working time in order to support the reconciliation of family and work life.

Reorganising the City or the municipality

Pressures to reorganise and improve the quality of services have led to some innovatory thinking about time. In particular, 'time in the city' projects in over 200 Italian cities are interesting examples of innovatory approaches to service delivery, interconnecting family, work and leisure time with city time schedules. Central to this has been the reorganisation and reduction of working hours through local collective bargaining forums of employers, unions and government - the Concertazione - which have adopted broad economic, political and social agendas in this respect.

One of the earliest and most successful ‘i tempi della città’ projects, in Modena, has developed new practices on working time alongside a network of services from kindergartens to the care of the elderly within this structure. The project was devised from a perspective and spirit of public service, particularly to enable women to balance their family and work schedules, rather than a business culture and has been highly successful (in sharp contrast to the UK where longer opening times for shops and businesses has led to disruption of family and social life). Moreover, trade unions believed that workers were providing a better quality service to citizens and that they were receiving recognition for this, either through bonuses, training and feeling valued. The value of public services was enhanced and the quality of services provided was substantially improved.

The growing recognition of the importance of city-time initiatives has led to a growing number of time projects across Europe, particularly in experiments in Germany, the UK and France. On a less ambitious scale municipal experiments in Sweden and Germany have led to improved services to local citizens within new work-time frameworks. Partnerships between the trade unions, employers and users have led to reduced working time as a trade-off for the introduction of flexible work (particularly by extending care services into the evening and weekends), whilst also introducing more choices in working time, extending equal opportunities, and responding to user needs. In many cases these experiments have led to improved services, without additional cost, and in the case of Germany have helped to reduce growing public deficits. In one municipality, Main-Kinzig, the experiment helped to improve the quality of services to the user, whilst also reducing the public deficit and preventing services from being contracted out or privatised for cost-cutting purposes.

Time as a resource

Time can be an important resource in the labour market that can be banked or credited for extended leave. Time banks and time accounts systems have been piloted in Italy, France, Germany and Norway and allow for overtime, additional hours worked, periods of high work demand and other bonuses, profit-sharing scheme and incentive payments to be translated into ‘banked’ time in most cases for up to one year and in the cases of some new proposals to create time banks over a lifetime. These schemes have normally been conceived as a means to reduce the extent and costs of overtime, but increasingly they are viewed as a means to allow for time to be taken for family responsibilities or leave. In Italy and Spain time banks have been organised through local citizens networks. In one experiment in the municipality of Barcelona in Spain a time bank has been developed for this purpose, particular to compensate for the inadequate redistribution of caring and domestic roles between women and men.

Creating jobs by changing working time: worksharing and job rotation

A growing emphasis has been placed on changing working time in order to create new jobs, as structural unemployment remains high. The possibilities for this have arisen as trade unions have sought trade-offs for flexible working time in the public services, particularly as services have been modernised and extended into the evenings and weekends, whilst also pursuing solidarity strategies with unemployed people. For example, the introduction of legislation in France (Loi Aubrey) in 1998 for a 35-hour working week and a national agreement in the Netherlands for a 36-hour working week have led to job replacement guarantees for reduced working time. In France, social security and tax incentives to employers are linked to making job replacements from reduced working hours a reality, with an overall objective to create new jobs for young unemployed people.

In Finnish municipalities, the introduction of more flexible services and production times has led to the standard 8-hour working day being split into two 6-hour jobs. The 6 + 6 working time model has improved and extended care and welfare services, whilst the splitting of one job into two jobs, has created new jobs particularly for young unemployed people. It is interesting that employees working the six-hour shift have not lost pay from their reduced daily working hours, neither did their productivity reduce. The impact of the schemes is that the Finnish Government recognises that the savings on social security payments to unemployed people more than compensate for financial and social costs of creating new jobs in the public sector.

This spirit of 'job rotation' has been an important feature of the pioneering Danish leave schemes, a model now adopted in a number of countries, and which allow for up to one year's leave (subsidised through the social security system) from the labour market for training, care or for sabbatical purposes. The leave schemes remain an important instrument of redistribution of time between employed and unemployed people, through principles of job rotation and worksharing, and a different way of conceiving working time reductions. Every leaver has to be replaced by an unemployed job seeker, who in turn gains valuable work experience.

Work-life balance in the UK: negotiating a new agenda

In the UK, the DfEE’s baseline survey and other surveys conducted by the TUC and other organizations show that workers want more control over their time and are creating more complex working time schedules. In some cases workers want time rises rather than pay rises. One finding from the DfEE’s survey Work-Life Balance 2000: Results from the Baseline Study was that:

There was a substantial demand for flexible working time arrangements from employees. More men wanted flexitime, compressed hours, and annualised hours than women. Women were more likely than men to want term time working or reduced hours.

In the UK, flexible working time includes part-time work, V-time working, job sharing, term-time working, compressed working week, working from home, time off in lieu, time accounts, flexible retirement, flexitime, self-rostering, shorter working hours, and annual hours systems.

Negotiating a work-life balance involves:

• Change in culture and reorganisation of work
• Consensual, joint and partnership approaches
• Partnership process

According to a recent publication of the TUC (2001) work-life balance requires a change in culture about how work is organised including a reorganisation of work, the development of trust, partnership approaches, and joint problem solving. In particular this mean that if changes are to benefits employers and employees alike this may mean that some people have to concede control while others may be asked to take more responsibility in their work. This marks a clear change in the way that industrial relations is organised and the move towards more consensual, joint and partnership working is regarded as a key instrument of the change management process underway in government and in employee-employer relationships.

The reorganisation of work includes:

• commitment to improving the organisation of work by each level of management, from supervisor to chief executive, union representatives and all grades of staff
• understanding what it means for management, unions and workforce: productivity and profitability, job security, job satisfaction and working time
• trust which is built by working in partnership to jointly identify and solve problems
• representation for all groups of staff who will be affected
• involvement through the widest possible consultation so that staff have the opportunity to contribute to solutions
• listening to aspirations and expectations
• considering ideas seriously - recognising that every idea, including the ones you don’t like, need to be examined
• transparency so that everyone knows what’s going on by keeping staff fully informed
• testing solutions - it is usually best to test new practices through a voluntary pilot study where staff are able to revert to existing terms and conditions if they wish
• action on possible solutions rather than shelving the issue until its too late
• confidence in a positive outcome

Bristol City Council: an example of work-life policy

The Time of Our Lives project at Bristol City Council is one of the best examples of a work-life balance project particularly because of the process through which change was implemented. The project was run by the TUC, Local Government Management Board, Bristol City Council and council trade unions in order develop for innovative working patterns that were also linked into improving the quality of Council services alongside employees’ choices for work-life balance. This was based on the development of a partnership to achieve the optimum ways to organise work and time within the context of a positive model of flexibility. The project had significant political and management leadership and trade union support (GMB, TGWU and UNISON) from the start which helped to engender an environment of trust and openness.

The project began by surveying staff and focus groups enabled staff to identify the working patterns that would enable them to have a work-life balance, for example, for child care or leisure time. The surveys revealed that a larger number of women than men wanted opportunities for education and training, men were more likely than women to say they wanted more family time, and the most common reason for wanting change was the desire to work more effectively with increased ‘uninterrupted focused’ working time. A pilot was run in the Library Service and despite some initial anxieties expressed by staff Sunday opening has been effectively introduced, resulting in an increase in library use and staff volunteering for Sunday working. Staff feel more in control of their working time through a variety of self-rostering and staff organised shift patterns. As one participant in the project stated:

‘Having the dialogue has been empowering for staff - they know they have an element of control in the workplace. That has had an impact not only on stress and sickness levels but also on productivity - people give more because they are more at ease with the way they work. We have been able to meet the two fundamental principles which underpin the project: to maintain and improve service delivery to the public, whilst meeting staff aspirations for a better work-life balance.’ (Kamaljit Poonia, Equalities Team Leader quoted in TUC booklet, Changing Times, 2001).

A vital element in the success of the project has been the process of joint working and the development of a partnership approach. In some cases this may result in a partnership agreement, in others the partnership process may help to facilitate staff ideas and to create management and staff discussions in order to enable innovate and creative responses, develop pilot projects and agree joint solutions.

Another example from the Health Service strategy is Working Lives: Programme for Change which has developed a range of initiatives to enable staff to have a work-life balance whilst at the same time giving hospitals more flexibility in organising working time, improving retention and recruitment and providing better patient care. Consultation, communication and involvement of staff is regarded as central to the success of the strategy. For example, Annual Hours schemes are designed to achieve a more even match between supply and demand for staff by distributing staff hours to meet changing levels of need across the year.

In conclusion, thinking about work/life balance and the politics of time directs attention to changing values associated with the division of time between work, family and leisure, between women’s and men’s time, and as a result the reorganisation of social and economic life at the individual, family or even city/town level. The process of change is complex. Fixed patterns of work around time and place are breaking down, and new working patterns and flexibility at work are emerging. Above all work-life balance opens up new possibilities and spaces for trade unions to take on a more pro-active agenda whereby employees can begin to shape their own working practices so that a work-life balance can help to achieve business and quality improvement goals along with work-life balance goals.