If you are employed by a private firm and particularly a FTSE 250 business you may find that work-life issues are firmly on the back burner compared to those in the public sector. The findings of the Human Resources/Accor Services survey show a chasm in attitudes to work-life balance between public and private-sector organisations.
On the face of it, the public sector is winning the work-life war hands-down. Without exception, the public-sector bodies questioned recognised that work-life balance was essential for its employees, and 71% had formal policies in place. However, in private organisations, the figure was a mere 22%. And, of FTSE 250 firms, just 14% had followed suit.
Why is this? Is public-sector life comparatively that much more full of stress and strain than private-sector life? Or has it perhaps the kind of bureaucracy that encourages the implementation of more people-friendly procedures? Do private organisations simply get on with it and deal with work-life balance scenarios as and when they arise, on an individual basis, without necessarily having to set up an entire strategy with all the bureaucracy that seems to accompany it?
And what of FTSE 250 companies? Do the comparatively high salaries paid negate the need for stringent work-life policies simply because staff can afford to take proper holidays, employ a childminder, travel in a decent car because they dont have the same financial worries as their public-sector counterparts?
Only as the competition for good people has increased has there been more recognition from some of these firms that taking work-life balance seriously and offering practical policies to help, may increase their chances of recruiting and retaining the best employees, says the HR director of one FTSE 100 company.
Of course, some public-sector firms may claim to have policies which we would never bother writing down but which are a natural part of good management. There is a perception that the bureaucratic nature of the public sector almost requires them to have a written policy on everything. Does this mean they are more forward-thinking? If we get a request for flexible working, we will consider it on a case-by-case basis and accommodate it where possible, she adds.
Motivation, happiness, productivity and satisfaction are regarded as a main benefit by 51% of survey respondents, as is retention (48%) and attracting staff (38%). And, unsurprisingly, retention is a key factor in the public sector with 71% citing it as a significant plus. It seems an anomaly, therefore, that work-life policies are not seen as a way of boosting a firms reputation as a good employer, with just 4% citing the latter to be the case.
Apathy and resistance to change
All the firms claiming that they do not recognise work-life balance to any degree belong to the private sector and include four FTSE 250 businesses in their number. Depressingly, the reasons given for this lack of people policies include apathy and a prevalence of set working cultures which results in resistance to change. But perhaps the fact that there are no measures labelled work-life balance does not necessarily mean that such processes do not exist.
Sandy Boyle is HR director at the chartered accountancy partnership, HLB Kidsons, a private body employing 1,200 people. Work-life balance is not formally recognised within the organisation he told Human Resources but matters are largely dealt with on an individual basis, depending on the persons particular circumstances.
Its informal, explains Boyle. Arrangements can be incorporated on an ad-hoc basis. In terms of having formal policies for mothers returning to work, for example, well, we have 25 offices and its left to them to decide how staff work.
Work-life balance is seen as a way of attracting and retaining people and we need to give more thought to people, he admits. We retain them by having more flexibility, but at the moment if a particular office thinks a request cant be accommodated, it wont be.
Boyle cites the instance of a partner in the firm who has recently had a baby and wants to continue working but does not want to be office-based. The company has set up office equipment in her home, which meets her needs and meanwhile it also benefits by retaining the skills of a valued partner.
HLB Kidsons has introduced health screening for its senior employees entitling them to a full health check every three to five years. But Boyle prefers to be cautious rather than throw new benefits and options at staff just for the sake of it. Work-life balance has been high-profile in the press but its about weighing up costs and benefits and not jumping on the bandwagon. Ours is a much more measured approach, he says.
Diane Lane, assistant director of HR at Hillingdon Hospital, is surprised that the public sector has come out so far ahead of private organisations when it comes to formal work-life balance policies. She says: I was always under the impression that private companies were able to do more.
They might pay a decent salary, adds Lane, but, if they pay the money, they expect more. Their bottom line is that they need to make money. [Private firms] are providing some kind of service, but at the end of the day, the majority of people have no choice but to use the NHS if they fall ill. We arent here to make money.
Offering people what they want
But part of the reason for the results could be that we are experiencing a number of skill shortages and starting to realise that we have got to offer whatever people want to get them into the organisation. Flexible working and those kinds of things allow them to fit their needs in with our needs, so there is mutual benefit.
The NHS Executive is telling us we have got to improve working life but, as a Trust, we would want to do that anyway. Weve had job-sharing for years and flexible working has become more prevalent in the past 12 to 18 months. Managers are becoming more clued-up about what they can offer.
Looking after the children
The Trust offers on-site childcare facilities and is expanding its day nursery in terms of hours and the number of places available. It is equally well used by male and female employees. There is also a summer holiday scheme whereby staff members children are taken to a holiday camp during the day where they are entertained under supervision. Maternity and paternity leave are regulated by the health services Whitley Council which gives guidance on leave quotas.
We have gone as far as we can for the moment in meeting the needs of staff but we are always looking at ways of helping them meet their work-life balance, says Lane.
She describes the NHSs Improving Working Lives campaign which started as a nursing initiative but has expanded into all NHS groups. There are three status levels: pledge, which indicates that processes are moving in the right direction; practice, whereby many policies are in place, but there is still room for more; and, the goal practice plus, which indicates that all standards have been met.
We were accepted as pledge standard in April 2001 and I think we will get to full practice plus in April next year, comments Lane. The human resources department also aims to reduce the long hours culture and improve the physical working conditions for staff, all of whom are consulted via questionnaires and discussion groups, prior to any changes being made.
The public sector has embraced both flexible working hours and job-sharing as the most effective flexible working patterns 87% of public organisations felt this way. Flexible working patterns have been touted as the way forward, especially with the progress being made in communications technology. Depending on the nature of the work being carried out, many people choose to perform various elements of their jobs from home if it is feasible to do so. Simply having the option to do this is said to increase productivity, even if it is taken advantage of only occasionally.
There is no doubt that the public sector comes off worse in terms of the amount of money at its disposal as the annual debate during pay negotiations will testify. It is more accountable, has to deal with acres of bureaucracy and is constantly being dragged through the press when league tables and the like come under scrutiny. Staff shortages take the NHS and teaching as two easy examples are a perennial problem, which could well have pushed public-sector HR work-life balance policies that much further than those of the private sector.
Indeed, catering for the needs of employees in a uniform manner seems to have become par for the course in the public sector. A report in The Guardian stated: There are pockets of enthusiasm for public service, mostly among those who say they would be teachers or hospital staff for almost any money, because they can never remember having wanted to do anything else.
Job security loses its pull
Another observation was that the benefits of job security that used to attract potential employees do not seem as attractive now. The same degree of security does not appear to apply any longer due to the public scrutiny and accountability inherent when working for the likes of the health service.
Ron Collard, UK HR operations director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which employs 20,000 people in the UK, says work-life balance issues lie at the heart of the companys business agenda. Work-life policies are part of a much wider business agenda which is about training, developing and supporting our people. We see it as an essential part of business in 2001 and thats reflected by the number of specific policies we have in place and related support mechanisms. Theres a very extensive flexible benefits policy which enables people to take or buy extra holidays, which clearly helps work-life balance and, with the flexible benefits, there are more obvious things such as childcare vouchers. We also have fully flexible working policies which work within obvious business constraints.
The company has recently launched a work-life website which provides extensive support and advice to help people with everything from accessing emergency cover for home arrangements to almost anything to help run their life.
Collard says staff are surveyed every 18 months to two years and the results provide hard evidence of the success of work-life balance policies. Its a regular feature of our policy of knowing what people want and like. The key differences between 1999 and 2001 are that staff say we have improved in the past two years. They appreciate the changes we have made but they are still flagging it as an important area, which we do accept.
Although the HR team is a very important driver in implementing work-life balance policies, Collard stresses that the issues are entrenched in PricewaterhouseCoopers overarching approach to helping its staff. Policies designed to help mothers return to work such as childcare vouchers are offered as standard. This puts them in the relatively low proportion of 7% of private companies that offer childcare vouchers (the public sector being only one percentage point ahead).
Its important to young people
When asked his reaction to our finding that many private and particularly FTSE 250 - firms do not have any work-life balance policies, Collard remarks, Im too long in the tooth to be surprised that some companies do not have work-life balance policies. But from government downwards, this is a big issue. The indications are that young people certainly consider it a very important part of how they conduct their lives. Its an important issue for us we have an average age here of 26, apart from partners.
Alicia Andrews prefers not to name the FTSE 100 media company for which she worked. A mother of two, she found that, although her former employer allowed women returners to work four days a week, this was granted with reluctance. Our survey revealed that 75%-99% of mothers at public-sector organisations returned after taking maternity leave, compared to just 50% of those working for private companies.
Says Andrews: The line manager accepted it but I dont think he was happy about the reduced working hours. Its a risk that can mean some women returning after maternity leave are made to feel like part-timers. I deeply resented the term part-time I was working 28 hours a week. And you tend to want to make it work, so you dont take lunch breaks.
Ive moved jobs because Id gone back to the company five days a week instead of four. I did that quite happily but commuting made it tiring. I now have a bicycle ride to work. Im working a five-day week but it takes the same amount of time as travelling into London did for a supposed four-day week. Im likely to be more loyal now employers tend to underestimate the loyalty of employees.
Andrews says her ex-employer did not encourage flexible working and most women who returned after maternity leave for four days a week eventually ended up reverting to five or quit. They knew they were not going to get promotion, working four days, says Andrews. The public sector tends to have more bureaucratic and more structured organisations. A lot of FTSE companies feel obliged to be socially responsible but they have adopted measures with an element of reluctance. There are a lot of middle-aged, middle-class men in the sector: they are quite traditional organisations.
She believes such companies often buy a package of benefits simply as a corporate version of keeping up with the Joneses. I think companies could think more imaginatively about people working from home occasionally. But its not all the employers fault flexible working requires employees to be responsible; its a two-way street.
Lloyds TSB has been praised for its approach to work-life balance issues. Its equal opportunities division, part of the companys group HR department, introduced a work options scheme to help ensure that the best staff were attracted and retained.
Clare Peel, equal opportunities manager at Lloyds TSB, was surprised to learn that the private-sector lags so badly behind the public as per our survey findings. Lloyds TSB offers a range of flexible working options so that staff can, for example, alter their hours to accommodate caring for an elderly relation, or to pursue a hobby.
What we do is as a response to the needs of our staff... to our ongoing aim of having a more balanced workforce. Its not just to say, We have a quota of this, or that, says Peel. Also, this is a very competitive environment and the one thing we want to distinguish ourselves from other competitors is the skills of our people so we want to do what we can to keep them.
People going on maternity leave have years of experience. If we dont have a scheme that allows them to return on a flexible basis then we arent responding to demand. By 2010, 22% of employees will have caring responsibilities. The scheme is reason neutral which simply means that the reason behind the request for flexible working is not important; its the business case that is. So, if the impact is beneficial or neutral, the work option is granted. Around 95% of requests are granted this is because the person making the application has had to think through the effect on costs and colleagues... once its signed off, everyone knows about it and people dont question it.
What used to happen is that flex was granted according to the perception of someones needs in some cases, managers would respond to that. There can be a huge amount of subjectivity involved but because our method is totally objective, you could apply for flex to pursue an interest or for a caring responsibility.
Around 30% of the companys 65,000 employees have opted to work flexibly. Peel is keen to stress that the thinking behind the work options scheme came from the top and, that despite having exceeded uptake targets, there is still a lot of work to do to communicate the benefits of flex to areas where take-up is inexplicably low.
As for HR professionals own work-life balance, the majority of respondents are evenly spread between working 40-44 or 45-49 hour weeks. Of those working 50-54 hours, the private sector came out at 23%, with the public trailing at 13%.
At Hillingdon Hospital, Lane says her work-life balance is not as good as that of her fellow employees: I dont practise what I preach. My working hours (45-50 per week) are quite high because we had a vacancy in the department. I dont take calls outside work but I was taking a large amount of work home. That went on for four to five months.
Long hours go with the territory
At HLB Kidsons Boyle works, on average, 50 hours a week. This includes two evenings and one or two phone calls outside working hours in a typical week. He does not work weekends. He has a young baby but deems his own work-life balance satisfactory and is not unhappy that his hours are on the high side compared with others we interviewed. Working outside normal hours goes with the territory. There are peaks and troughs in any business and things can be busier at certain times but Im quite happy with my work-life balance.
Overall, the public sector, for whatever reason, does seem to be winning the work-life balance policy war. Private firms, particularly those with shareholders to answer to, may by necessity have to keep their eyes firmly fixed on the bottom line rather than anywhere else. But there are private companies which have made impressive strides to recognise the true value in monetary and wider terms of the importance of work-life balance and these should be commended for being pioneers.
Lessons can certainly be learned from the public-sectors approach. When you compare the proportion of public-sector HR professionals satisfied with their own work-life balance 78% with the private sector, which stands at 56%, it appears, reassuringly, that the public sector is practising what it preaches. And the private sector is not too far behind...
Survey background
We interviewed 210 HR professionals on the subject of work-life balance. The sample included 63 public sector organisations, 49 FTSE 250 companies and 98 other private-sector firms. Interviews were carried out by telephone questionnaire, developed and piloted by Objective Research. The sample was taken from Human Resources magazines subscriber database.
