Historically, changes in the way we think about working families tended to reflect contemporary social and economic trends, whether it was changes in families, the growing number of women in the workforce, skills shortages, the globalisation process, or the recession of the early 1990s. Back in the 1960s, questions were asked about the impact of mothers' employment on children, rather than how to support working parents. There was also some published research raising questions about the impact of women's employment on their husbands. This reflected deeply held assumptions about ideal families and seems outdated now, but it made sense at the time. The questions we ask are all historically embedded.
So, what might the future hold for workplaces, families and communities in these challenging economic times? There are a number of possible scenarios. At one extreme things will get worse; those still in employment will work even harder, while others will struggle to find jobs. Employers may withdraw or limit access to work-life policies as some did in the 1990s recession. At the other extreme the financial crisis could be a tipping point, enabling an unfreezing of conventional ways of thinking and heralding a reassessment of values and assumptions about the way we work and quality of life. There have long been concerns about the fairness and social sustainability of many contemporary forms of work in terms of the effects on individuals, families and communities. However, in these discussions, economic sustainability tended to be taken for granted. That has changed. Many people will be asking whether all their hard work, that left little time and energy for personal life, was worth it. We could witness an emerging transformation in approaches to work and personal life. What would it take for this optimistic scenario to stand a chance?
First, we need to revisit the terminology that shapes our thinking. The notion of work-life balance emerged in response to late 20th and early 21st century changes in the nature of work, such as intensified workloads and also technology that blurs the boundaries between work and non-work, creating feelings of imbalance. However, we contend that the work-life balance approach focuses on surface manifestations of deeper problems. It focuses on providing choices within the current systems but not on changing these systems or the bigger picture within which work-life balance problems arise.
Second, we need to ask new questions to replace old debates. Below we identify some current questions and the shifts that are needed to frame the future agenda. Some are already being asked - but they are not yet mainstream.
1. Shifting from ‘what policies can be developed to support working families?' to ‘how can workplace culture and practice support working families?'
Laws and policies are essential to provide rights for workers. Great strides have been made over the past 30 years in government and workplace policies to support working families. But we need to focus on the ways in which policies are implemented, how work is carried out and valued. Giving people the right to, for example, work flexible hours, alongside intensified workloads or without tackling cultures in which only those who work long and inflexible hours are fully valued, is clearly not sufficient.
Recent European research shows that workers who make use of formal flexible working policies do not necessarily report greater satisfaction with work-life balance and in some cases they are more dissatisfied. There are a number of possible explanations for these findings: formal flexible working arrangements don't really provide autonomy and control; they blur the boundaries between work and personal life, enabling people to work more; work intensification due to heavy workloads or the fast pace of work undermines policies; flexible workers are not valued. There is some evidence to support all these explanations. For example, work intensification can make it difficult to take time off for childcare emergencies, even when parents are entitled to do so, because they know that already overburdened colleagues will have to cover for their absences.
Policies such as the Working Time Directive can help, in some cases, to ensure time but not necessarily energy is available for families. Perhaps the next step might be a working intensity directive. So policies are necessary but not sufficient. The question now is how we can build on policies to challenge assumptions about how work is organised and which workers are valued.
2. Shifting from ‘how can we enable women (and in some cases men) with family responsibilities to adapt to current workplace practices?' to ‘how can we challenge unrealistic expectations at work and value diverse ways of working for men and women?'
The myth that managing work and family life is just a women's issue is waning in some organisations. Yet it is still widely assumed that men do not need to change the way they work. Most workplaces are still structured around a cultural picture of the ideal worker who has no family or personal obligations beyond work. Hence unrealistic expectations about how people can work go unchallenged.
This can lead to overvaluing and rewarding inefficient and time-wasting ways of working and obscures the effectiveness of alternative working practices. It undermines not only gender equity but also workplace effectiveness. So we need to move beyond debates about how to enable mainly women to adapt to current workplace cultures and look for ways of challenging deeply ingrained assumptions about ideal workers and the place of work in people's lives.
3. Shifting from ‘how can people be helped to better manage their work and family time?' to ‘why is time at work valued more than time spent on other activities, in our society?'
The notion of the ideal worker who can give more and more time to work implies that working time tends to be valued more than time for families and communities, by employers and perhaps more widely. There is also visible and invisible time in the workplace. For example, time at work in the early morning is often valued less than time spent at work late into the evening. Those who use flexitime or informal flexibility to come in to work very early and leave early, often to collect children from school, report that they are often undervalued or regarded as part-timers, while those who come in later but work late and call late meetings, are considered to be highly committed.
So we need to ask questions about why working time and especially some forms of working time are more valued than other time and about what sort of society we want to live in if we primarily value people who work all the time.
The rhetoric is that we value families and communities, yet the people who seem to be most valued are those who prioritise work. The questions for the future are not just about how to manage time but also about the ways in which time is valued and what that means for wider society.
4. Shifting from ‘how can we enhance work-life balance?' to ‘how can we enhance fulfilment, happiness and social justice?'
Workplace practices that are incompatible with family and other obligations either assume an outdated model of relations between men and women or imply that profits (or other work-related outcomes) are more important than people. If the recession is really to be a tipping point, we may need to face up to the social justice implications, and indeed the irrationality of this. Profits for what, if not quality of life and sustainable societies?
This is where greed comes in. Greed in its various forms is highly relevant to the work-family debate. At the time of writing the greed of MPs' expenses is much in the news but this reflects wider trends; organisations that are greedy about how much of employees' time they use; greedy consumers who work more and more to spend and spend; greedy societies that want to acquire ever more wealth while others struggle with poverty.
We know that a certain threshold of affluence is needed to meet people's needs but also that beyond an optimal threshold extra wealth does not equate with extra happiness and fulfilment. Does the modern economy meet our needs for fulfilment, happiness and social justice?
These debates are not new but this time of economic turbulence may be the time for other voices to be heard. Might this be the new debate replacing work-life balance? This will call for a radical rethink of assumptions and values about the place of work and families and other aspects of life in people's overall lives, about economic systems, about greed at many levels, and about economic fulfilment and needs beyond an optimal level.
Systemic change usually takes a long time, but it could be helped along by shifts in the debates and the ethos in which we think about the issues. Current economic difficulties could galvanise new ways of thinking and implementing a new era of relating work to other parts of life, even if we cannot plan the changes in detail. With a new agenda to shape our thinking, many of the questions we have been asking about work and family before the current economic downturn may well seem outdated in another 30 years.
Suzan Lewis is professor of organisational psychology at Middlesex University Business School
This essay is part of Tomorrow's world - perspectives on work and family life in the future a collection of essays published by Working Families
