Professor Barbara Pocock, of the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, thinks that we shouldn’t be talking about work-life balance at all. We should call it work-life interference, and try to measure how much work interferes with our life.
Professor Pocock leads a research team that conducts an annual survey relating to work-life in Australia. The survey has been running for three years now, so she and her team are starting to be able to pick out some trends. The most recent survey shows that part time work is no magic solution to the work-life balance struggle.
Professor Pocock, director of the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, told The Weekend Australian full-time working women should not kid themselves that going part-time would solve their problems.
“A third of full-time working women overall, 40 per cent of mothers and 25per cent of women without children, say they would rather work part-time,” she said.
“But this study suggests a lot of women will be disappointed by the amount of emotional relief they get by going part-time. On average, it will be better, but it is certainly not as big a change as you might expect.
“Everyone thinks those two free days mean you can run a house without help. So women tend not to purchase substitutes for their own time — they are much less likely to use a cleaner. But on the other side of that is a workplace that is often asking you to work from home or be available on those days off.”
I was deeply relieved to hear that. My own experience, having worked both official part time hours, and as a casual, is that the juggle gets no better. If I am working part time, then the amount I do at home and in the community simply increases, and my overall commitments don’t decrease. I could forego the community work, but I don’t do a lot of that anyway, and for the most part it’s centred around my children’s school, which relies heavily on volunteer parents (mostly mums, but quite a few dads too). Other parents at my daughters’ school say the same; if they do less paid work, then they simply end up doing more housework. Of course, data is not the plural of anecdote, and until now, my evidence has been only at the level of anecdote. So it’s rather nice to have my suspicion that part time work is a crock confirmed.
But it part time workers are unhappy with their work-life balance, full time workers are even less satisfied, especially mothers. Here Professor Pocock has some interesting data. Overall, about two-thirds to three-quarters of workers are satisfied with their work-life balance. However, over the three years that the study has been running, men’s satisfaction with work-life balance has remained about the same, but women’s has decreased (p.25 of full report). Professor Pocock speculates that this may have something to do with the economic downturn. The survey was conducted in March 2009, when the downturn was still very much heading down. Elsewhere, we’ve seen that although more men are losing jobs, creating the so-called “man-cession” (like, d’oh, go get a job in the caring sector, where lots of women have retained their jobs), women have remained responsible for the daily balancing of household budgets (Time article, UK Government Equalities Office report PDF – 528kb), creating extra stress for them, and perhaps adding to the daily struggle to balance work and life.
It does seem that a bit of flexibility is part of the answer; employees who asked for and were granted flexibiltiy in thier work arrangements reported much less work-life “interference” (Professor Pocock’s term – more on that below). Unsurprisingly, employees who were not granted flexibility remained unhappy, but so too did employees who were granted only a bit of flexibility, not all the flexibility they had asked for (p. 67 of the full report). It’s an all or nothing deal. Professor Pocock suggests that this means that legislation needs to do more than allow employees to ask for flexibility. It needs to put some onus on the employer to grant it if at all possible.
There’s lots of fascinating data in the report. It’s all available on-line, along with several press releases, from the Centre for Work and Life’s homepage.
But… work-life “interference.” I can see why Professor Pocock uses this term; a lot of the work is based around asking respondents to what extent they feel that their work interferes with their life. I’m not so keen on that, because no matter what, if you and the kids are to be fed and clothed and educated and housed and kept healthy and tended when unwell, then someone’s got to work, either running a business or as an employee, or at the most basic level, growing food and making shelters and clothes. Irrevocably, work is part of life, and one way or another, we have to find a way to juggle work commitments with family and life commitments. I prefer to see it as a juggle. That to me captures the sense that work is part of what we do, not something that interferes with what we do. It’s one of the many things we need to manage. “Juggle” also captures the sense that if just one thing goes wrong, a slight mishandling, a ball that’s a bit too heavy or fraction larger than the others, then unless we are very, very skilled, or very highly resourced (family and friends nearby to help, sympathetic employer, plenty of money to buy your way out of trouble), or just plain lucky, then it will all come crashing down.
But that’s a mere quibble. This is a fascinating project, and it will be interesting to see what comes out of it in future years.
Interesting post. I’m with you on questioning the term ‘interference’; work shouldn’t be viewed as an intrusion on one’s ‘real life’ in my opinion. Its just as much a part of life as anything else. That said, I actually like my job and it is a career position, so I’m fairly privileged in comparison to, say, someone working dead-end retail because they have no other choice.
Personally, I place a lot of blame for work/life stress on the spaces we live in – planning focused on keeping cars moving has meant that work and shops and home and other facilities are often separated by miles and miles.
Up until recently, I lived quite a distance from work, in a low-denisty suburb, and by far the largest source of stress and life imbalance was the amount of time I spent travelling – hours every day. Without a car. It took a tremendous amount of forward planning and scheduling to keep things ticking over, all the while being fairly constantly fatigued – and I’m a singleton. Juggling kids as well would be a nightmare even if I sacrificed reltively neccessary personal activities like going to the gym regularly – and of course, we’ve all read accounts confirming this from mothers. ‘Mum’s taxi’, no time for the self, the primary school being in the opposite direction from work, etc.
Moving to a high-density suburb a few minutes from work with most things in walking distance is heaven by comparison, but not possible for so many people. We really need to stop condensing major employment spaces into small sections of the city, isolated from residential areas. The return of mixed-use development seems to be taking the edge off things in some places, particularly around the inner city, but new greenfield developments where young families are pushed still largely comprise several square miles of nothing but houses, plus a giant borg-cube mall at one end (North Lakes, anyone?). And stuff-all public transport, too.
Good post, thanks.
One year long ago I had two 0.5 part-time jobs. I quickly discovered that
0.5 + 0.5 = 1.3
(approximately),… and that was quite apart from the effect the 1.3 had on our life outside work.
This artificial distinction between life and work always makes me uncomfortable. Work is a very big part of our lives and always has been; so much so that many languages don’t have words to express our concepts of work and leisure. It’s mass wage labour that’s novel viewed in the broad sweep of history.
I prefer to regard our major challenge as adapting work so that it is a harmonious element of our lives – a task where we have already had a lot of success. Many people get intrinsic rewards from their labour and old Marxist notions of inevitable alienation have been demonstrated to be one of his least insightful ideas (unless of course you want to embrace the concept of false consciousness which is a get-out-of-gaol-free for just about anything).
Assuming that work is bad and interferes with life, which is somehow better, seems to encourage a culture of resentment and victim-hood that offers no constructive way forward. Note that none of this is to deny the importance of work practices that enhance flexibility, I’m criticising the fundamental mindset that sometimes surrounds the discussion.
Why do people live their lives this way though, trying to cram every last thing into their lives at the risk of having it all fall down? Why not just try to take on a bit less so you can carry it comfortably with spare capacity for when things get tough?
Reminds me of studying for 2 half-credit subjects versus 1 full credit subject. The half-credit looks superficially easier, but you wind up doing more work and feeling more stressed.
Maybe the problems of half-time and half-credit activities are also related to diffuse focus, and unavoidable inefficiency? You know, repeatedly starting and stopping different activities, costing start-up and close-down time on each activity?
Do people go part-time in order to “do less stuff” though? Or is it to spend less time doing stuff at work so they can do more stuff elsewhere (be it to spend time with children, housework etc).
Ken @ 3 – for many I think a better description would be work-family balance rather than work-life. I don’t think there is a perfect balance between the two that will please everyone. And I think people need to accept that its pretty much impossible to excel to the same extent at both at the same time compared to just doing one. The best you can hope for is that you can negotiate a compromise that you’re happy with.
Yes, Elise.
Or switching focus.
I was lucky, there was only one day when I travelled from one job to the other. 4 days when I did just that job that day.
Juggling was what it felt like, because there were after-hours tasks too.
“Reminds me of studying for 2 half-credit subjects versus 1 full credit subject. The half-credit looks superficially easier, but you wind up doing more work and feeling more stressed.”
When my partner was first pregnant, I half hoped for twins, thinking there might be an economy of scale. Someone who had twins assured me there was: with one baby, he said, you lose about 70 per cent of your sleep, with twins you only lose 100 per cent.
But back on topic, in response to desipis, the ‘juggle’ isn’t always just about the absolute number of hours of work, or the absolute number of things you’ve taken on, it’s about having a certain flexibility in the scheduling of those things. Even with reduced hours, the genuine flexibility demanded by much care work is hard to come by. You often need to respond to unexpected and unpredictable demands that require attendance of the carer at home or at school or hospital or nursing home during work hours. It is the dynamic nature of the problem from a worker’s perspective that presents the challenge to the way we have traditionally regulated workplaces.
“Why not just try to take on a bit less so you can carry it comfortably with spare capacity for when things get tough?”
I do wonder about this with some people I know, who really do look – at least from outside – like they could drop a couple of things and be happier. But a lot of lives are just barely sustainable, even among the relatively well off. It’s obviously a difficult thing to reduce your expectations, to cease to live as part of a particular class (and I do hesitate to use that word because I’m not sure it connotes the degree of specificity I have in mind). Difficult enough, anyway, that most would prefer to keep it all moving, or even moving faster when new problems or responsibilities come along.
And then there are those who don’t have a choice, even a disavowed or unrecognised one, and for whom this kind of juggling is about survival.
It is also true that flexibility in certain circumstances becomes a code-word for being underpaid, always on call, never able to find any place (mental or otherwise) of comfort away from work. The nature of some work has complicated the question, and that is why I think ‘interference’ may be a better metaphor in some cases than it superficially seems.
I’m also uncomfortable with, what seems to me, to be a problematic separation of work from life. Flexibility does seem to be the key here, so that people can manage all their duties and pleasures. But it’s such a hard thing to achieve. Grumphy is also right to say commuting time is a killer.
Something which annoys me in many of these conversations is that work/life gets turned into family/life and then family gets interpreted into Mum, Dad and the kids. I think the fastest growing household type is people living alone. Family needs to be interpreted for this purpose into whatever a person wants it to be. There needs to be the capacity for a person to take time off to take a friend to hospital for instance, or look after a pet for a day after an operation (dare I say it). Otherwise you get the situation, which I’ve seen in workplaces, in which the single, childless person bears the brunt of overtime work etc, because they’re perceived not to have a family. Flexibility for everyone, I say.
I think a term missing but that many have touched on in one way or another is ‘meaningful work’. I have been fortunate in my working life to have the ability and opportunity to have meaningful work, and it certainly helps ease the sense of conflict between work and non-work life and commitments. It can also though blur the line to the point that my partner feels I never leave work at work, and that is also problematic. I find that many people working in areas such as social justice, the environment and care work struggle with this – they are passionate about and love their job, find the work meaningful, but that becomes another thing to manage to ensure that non-work time is quarantined – this is needed as much to ‘recharge’ for the job as for all the other standard reasons.
I dream of being able to work 4 days a week. Then I could have a day to do the housework etc. and two days doing whatever I pleased, goes the simplistic vision. Weekends currently fly by and the working week is back upon me. Add in that my full-time job does require work at times on the weekend or in the evenings, and like many people I feel very time poor – being paid overtime for the after hours stuff is helpful on the lower wage I now have, but I always miss the time as well. It’s just as well I love my job or it would not be very bearable at times, but that raises the issue above.
I don’t think comparing working multiple part time jobs to working reduced hours from a full-time commitment is particularly helpful. I’ve no doubt that people working more than one job that nominally add up to 1 FT equivalent end up working more than a single full-time position. I think that’s very different to working less days a week, period. While the part-timers I know at work find that their ‘two day a week’ job actually means ‘two 10 hour days a week’ far too often, generally they are much more satisfied that working less has created space for other obligations & pursuits, be they family, community, other.
Personally I think part of the issue for everyone is that many jobs now operate at a pace I can only describe as ‘relentless’. There’s never downtime, never a less than 100% commitment required, rarely time to reflect, and going home early on occasion is a scarce occurrence. Flex sheets operate in the red constantly, or ‘flexible working hours’ actually means giving more, more often.
As I said, I love my job, but having just marked the 1 year anniversary in it, the pace never lets up, and it is at times very emotionally intense work, and always requires a high level of intellectual commitment. I feel fatigued often, and I don’t have kids (although I do have a partner with chronic pain). I worry I’ll burn out because I’m regularly denied ‘recharge’ time, so it effects my work productivity as much as my ‘work/life balance’ in broader terms.
In sum, even meaningful work doesn’t solve some of the pressures of the modern workplace, and I’m not surprised that more people feel dissatisfied. It’s about intensity as well as length of commitment expected, the level of intrusion (or interference) into cherished family / rec time even when you love your job, and a general sense of having the life sucked out of you at times, or not even being afforded the time to reflect on whether this is what you really want; or to have the choice to modify it.
great post, thanks
Oh FFS – if you are alive then everything is life. How do you define work? Tak emy wife for example – she has started her own business doing her passion. She loves it but it compromises her time with the kids, family and friends. Is it work or isn’t it?
I havent’ worked out yet how to get paid shed laods to ride bikes, sail, watch footy and drink beer.
You know how Razor, you just don’t have the capital to be able to do it.
Well I did the good protestant thing and worked and worked and worked. When work too away overtime and flexitime I just kept working. When the deadline was moved and at the end of a week of ten hour days I saw that an entire week of work remained I rolled up my sleeves and worked 30 hours straight.
I went the distance. It’s easy really and anything else is pure laziness.
At least that’s what I told myself.
And then I hit the wall. Big time. I’ve lost a year so far, any time off has of course been on my own coin. Sometimes I struggle to get in and when I do I get colleagues helpfully telling me to buck up, that my illness is probably just in my head.
I smile and thank them. And go home on time every day now.
dj @ 13 – thursday night – hope springs eternal.
Tssk
I had the good fortune to burnout at 26. I look at it now as good fortune, because being young I had the resilience to bounce back largely unscathed, and learning such a valuable lesson young I think has saved me from a lot of heartache.
What led to the burnout was working up to 100 hour weeks. There was a 6 month period where I accrued nearly 3 months in overtime, and didn’t have a single weekend off. It was a running joke in the office including managers that I should have a bed in there, but no-one intervened. The result was double pneumonia in the first 10 days I took off. The rest of the result was an inability to function and complete loss of productivity. I remember clearly sitting in front of my computer and bursting into tears because I couldn’t think how to spell ‘the’.
I left that job, went overseas and worked as a nanny for a year as much to give my brain a chance to recover, and fortunately it did, although my memory has never been as good. I came back to professional work with an aggressive attitude to work-life balance, that has softened with time but still has firm limits. I’m very grateful that I didn’t have a nervous breakdown, not least because my father has had 4.
Ignore your dumb colleagues, I hope you have some good external support, and take care of yourself.
Well mid 30′s for me so I’m not bouncing back as quick, however I can thank my lucky stars I didn’t suffer a stroke. My memory has taken a battering, there’s a whole three month period straddling when I was well/when I was sick that I’ve lost completly. I go to be early every night just in case I have a ‘bad’ morning where it will take me hours to get out of bed. That way I can still make iti in to work on time.
At least my higher ups have been good to me and in the previous years I had squirrled away enough money not to worry about the financial hit. Regardless, after doing my hours today I will knock off at the right time regardless of the grinding of others teeth. I’m not going to push myself to the edge so they can say nice things at my funeral.
Funny thing though…back before it happened the workaholics who were always saying we should try harder were all out of the office hours before me. There’s a lesson in that somewhere.
Don’t know if your workplace has a counselling service Tssk, but it was a rock for me, in fact was the only professional advice I got to counter the culture at my workplace that said what was happening to me was ok. I got very practical advice on taking care of myself, negotiating a more appropriate work regime etc. Without it I was so far ‘in’ to the situation I wouldn’t have worked out what was so wrong. If you don’t have access via work I’d recommend sourcing someone yourself.
just some food for thought, cos it’s kind of worrying to read about you going to be early so you can make it into work.
Hope you don’t mind the gratuitious advice, and I’ll leave it there.
I think the term work-leisure balance might be more apt. In addition to catering for singles to legitimately claim value and need for things outside paid work, I think it better indicates that people need to balance all forms of work not just employment related work.
I think its interesting how readily people cut back on spending due to the GFO even though they weren’t personally affected, yet people seem to drive themselves to the wall just to keep up with what others have.
Where does getting the silent treatment from the spouse for not doing enough house work come in the work/life balance equation? Hell, I’m trying to watch footy on the weekend and she wants me hanging out clothes – how does that balance?
Mr.Lovell has fallen asleep at the wheel.Perhaps it was a computer game involving transport of some ancient and forgotten decade.Ironing clothes is now an extreme sport,and I now am the proud owner of at least ten ironing boards.Maybe the Lifehacker sites will turn them into valuable collectors items..or I’ll stare through them and see the grid.
It balances in that it takes all of an ad break to hang the laundry and then you can watch the rest of the footy in peace!
Or position the TV so it can be seen from the washing line. And keep adding TVs so wherever housework must be done there is also a TV
razor – you are probably lucky anyone wants you – even to hang out the clothes.
Francis – I count my blessings everyday.
Work Life Balance is a very personal thing. It is very different for everyone, and only the individual can determine if he or she has life balance. It means being able to enjoy and thrive in your work life, your personal life, and your family live simultaneously, without guilt, without internal conflicts, and on your own terms. The key is that each person has to want to do so and know what it really is. It does not mean having to spend one third of your time with each life. It means deciding upon the amount of time, the when of time, and the degree of time and energy devoted to each life. I know of thousands of people who have done so. They all lead very different lives, their stress levels are very low, even nonexistent, and their success levels are very high in all three of their lives.
It is true that one tends to volunteer for parenting, and also that most of us wouldn’t give it away for quids. Ie the many extra quids that we would definitely have if we weren’t parents. But still, it’s hard to see all of the many extra responsibilities and chores as ‘leisure’ classically defined.
I am a semi retired engineer who worked most of my life full time then moved by choice to part-time then casual before retirement. The move to part-time meant longer holidays and shorter weeks but it did signal that I wasn’t interested in further promotion and it sometimes meant that I wasn’t there for meetings that i would have preferred to attend. From my employers point of view part-time was practical because I had moved to a technical role, I was willing to be flexible when necessary and I was able to take my batphone and computor with me on holidays so that I could deal with issues if required. (Generally worked out at less than a couple of days work in a 10 week holiday.)
Some of the casual work was for my previous employer but quite a bit of it was for other people. The pluses included much higher hourly pay rates and the chance to be involved in a wide range of projects and to compare diferent management styles and ways of doing things.
The biggest plus of all was that I was paid by the hour. This meant that, if there was nothing urgent to do, I felt free to decide how much I was going to work on a day without the guilt and pressure that is part and parcel of working for a salary.
The negatives included low income security and a feeling of being an outsider compared with permenant employees. There were also situations where jobs were delayed for various reasons and there was an expectation that I would be on unpaid standby. There were also problems with design jobs where asmall amount of review work and meetings would be required for quite some time after the full time part of the job had finished. I learn’t that it was important to specify when I wouldn’t be available before starting a job and to specify the max number of hours I was willing to work on any one day.
My experience says that part-time and casual work can be good at times in your life. However, it is important to realise that you can lose more than just pay when you move away from full time. It is important that both you and your employer have a clear understanding of what is being entered into for part time and casual work.
In the mean time we should be campaigning for salaries to be replaced by hourly wages. Salaries are responsble for the growing time pressure on professional emloyees. Salaries also mean that there is not enough pressure on managers to use employee time efficiently.
That’s my point. Parenting should fall on the work side of that equation, i.e. parents should work less, parent more, and deal with having less material wealth and career success than their non-breeding peers. It seems to be accepted that parents should sacrifice everything to get the absolute best for their kids, and that taking anytime
Anthony:
Well in the same way I’m advocating not taking on more hours than is humanly sustainable, one shouldn’t take on more responsibilities than is humanly sustainable either. If you’ve got a responsibility to be available at a moments notice to deal with kids, don’t take on a role for which an unexpected absence will incur a significant cost (either personally or professionally).
How delightfully… optimistic of you.
I’m sensing a certain lack of willingness to acknowledge the relative economic priviledge enjoyed by many commenters here.
Grumphy @31: Quite right about the money. I have enjoyed the move to more flexible hours because it doesn’t really matter if the outcome is less control over my earnings or a drop in job security.
Having said that, the increase in job flexibility has certainly been good for my quality of life. When I took ten weeks holiday in 1998 it was a bit radical and was only acceptable because we had just got batphone connected email that allowed me to do something if really necessary. (Did a days process calcs – I was their only process engineer.) Ditto when i moved to 4 days work a week in return for a 20% pay cut. Now part time and casual is no real cause for comment.
The new flexibility has helped reduce the amount of unemployment due to the GFC. unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be helping new workers or those who have actually lost their jobs. to avoid skill shortages in future we really need to maintain the total number of skilled workers in a job, not just avoid the laying off of skilled workers who have a job.