Step 3: Identify the possible solutions
Examples
Work-life balance issues vary from organisation to organisation. It depends on the nature of the business, the size, style and culture of the organisation, the characteristics of the workforce, the geographical location and the history of the organisation. The solutions are just as varied. Listed below are some identified work-life balance issues and ideas for solutions.
- Communication
- The need for flexibility
- Hours of work, including shifts and rosters
- Job design
- The way work is organised and managed
- Workloads
- Skills and confidence of managers
- Leave
Communication
What's the issue?
One of the most common work-life balance issues is that employees and managers do not know what is already available and/or working in the organisation. Problems include:
- people are not aware of existing policies
- people are not aware of practices that are already working successfully in other parts of the organisation
- employees do not know that they can ask about alternative working arrangements or specific provisions
- new employees have not been told about available options
- the length of time since employees were told about work-life balance policies at their induction.
What might you do?
There are two levels of communication that are typically needed - a base-level awareness and knowledge that all employees require, and access to more detailed information when and if employees need it, e.g. when going on parental leave.
Strategies being used by organisations to address this include:
- enhanced induction programmes for employees and new managers
- using newsletters, pamphlets, posters and intranet to give people overview information and detailed information on specific issues (these resources need to be kept up to date)
- discussion prompts that teams are asked to talk about, and respond to, on a regular basis
- equipping employee advisors and/or union delegates to assist people with queries related to work-life balance issues.
The need for flexibility
What's the issue?
Flexibility in work arrangements and working hours typically heads the list of things people identify as helping them achieve a satisfactory work-life balance. Useful arrangements include:
- flexible start and finish times
- employees choosing their own working hours
- employees choosing their own lunch times
- being able to attend to family matters or personal business on occasion during normal working hours
- being able to leave work for family emergencies
- working from home
- taking time-in-lieu for working additional hours.
Difficulties with flexibility include:
- employees and managers being unsure about their organisation's attitude to flexible work arrangements
- different approaches taken by different managers, even when work requirements are similar
- access to flexibility being available on a grace-and-favour basis, and hence causing resentment
- managers not being equipped to manage flexible working arrangements
- organisations relying on traditional arrangements, and hence not looking for constructive solutions
- employees thinking only about their own needs, and not recognising that flexible work arrangements have to work for the organisation and the rest of their team as well as for them.
What might you do?
Solutions typically include some combination of:
- formal policies
- guidelines and training on managing flexible work arrangements
- encouraging and equipping employees and managers to take a problem-solving approach to considering flexible working arrangements, and to apply good-faith principles to considering flexibility requests
- providing structured opportunities for managers to exchange ideas and experiences of successful flexible working arrangements
- getting teams to develop their own agreed protocols about flexible working arrangements to ensure sufficient cover and back-up
- developing protocols and providing equipment for people to work from home on either a casual or regular basis.
Hours of work, including shifts and rosters
What's the issue?
Work that requires cover for specific hours, including shifts and rosters, is often one of the most difficult work environments for people wanting a satisfactory work-life balance. Key difficulties can include:
- lack of predictability
- lack of flexibility to meet individual needs, either short term or long term
- getting stuck on a shift or roster, e.g. night shift, that does not work well for the individual
- start and finish times that make caring for children, or getting to and from work, difficult
- too many changes so that people are not able to adjust their sleeping patterns effectively.
These difficulties particularly impact on:
- people's ability to spend time with family
- relationships
- social lives
- fatigue levels
- overall health
- the ability to maintain fitness.
What might you do?
It is unlikely that these difficulties can be eliminated. However, some organisations have found useful ways of minimising them. These include:
- staggered start and finish times so people can select those that best fit with their personal circumstances
- working with teams to find the roster or shift pattern that best fits the needs of the business and employees
- developing a pool of trained casuals who can fill in on a regular basis
- developing protocols for people to swap shifts or rosters, or even parts of a shift, to enable employees to attend a regular commitment
- researching and following best-practice principles in designing shifts and rosters
- making greater use of part-time staff to cover unpopular shifts
- putting in place a process for people to indicate shift or roster preferences
- negotiating a framework or process for requesting flexibility within any collective employment agreement.
Job design
What's the issue?
It is easy for organisations and employees to assume that the traditional pattern of full-time work within conventional working hours is the way that jobs will always be designed. This approach, however, works well only for some businesses and some employees. For some businesses it can cause difficulties by:
- restricting the pool of people to recruit from
- making it harder to retain valuable staff when their personal circumstances change
- making it harder to meet the needs and expectations of customers
- creating bottlenecks in work flows, and under-utilising equipment and plant.
For some employees it can cause difficulties in:
- having sufficient time and energy for other responsibilities
- hours of work not fitting well with other commitments or their personal energy levels
- raising stress levels as they try to juggle more than they can comfortably manage.
Even when organisations are open to using arrangements such as part-time work or job-sharing, they may still try to put it into a full-time work mould. Meetings will be scheduled at times when part-time employees are not working. Hours of work and remuneration may be decreased while the workload is not. There may be no flexibility for moving between full-time and part-time work as circumstances change. Sometimes it might be wrongly assumed that people who choose to work other than the conventional arrangements, may not be serious about their career.
What might you do?
Organisations that want to address this issue are becoming much more open to arrangements such as part-time work, job-sharing, compressed working weeks, variable hours at different times of the year, or even part-year work for employees, at all levels and all areas of the organisation. They are also becoming a great deal more considered in their assessment of the suitability of these arrangements and what they can do to make them work. They are using strategies such as:
- developing protocols for moving between full-time and part-time work
- allowing managers to job-share
- ensuring that meetings, training and social events consider the needs of part-time employees as well as full-time employees
- varying the times of meetings so that everyone can attend some of the time
- making sure that those who cannot attend
- are briefed about the meeting
- monitoring work demands more carefully so
- they can predict staffing needs more accurately.
The way work is organised and managed
What's the issue?
The way that work is organised and managed can lead to frustration and unnecessarily long or unpredictable hours that impact negatively on people's work-life balance. Typically this may be a result of:
- inadequate or poorly maintained equipment that makes the job harder
- poor planning, which leads to unnecessary work peaks
- poor planning or resourcing of expected and necessary work peaks
- inappropriate deadlines and scheduling
- inadequate systems and documentation that leads to unnecessary confusion or duplication
- inefficient reporting which wastes time and adds little value.
In some organisations, addressing these issues is the most direct way of improving people's ability to achieve a satisfactory work-life balance.
What might you do?
Some of these issues need to be tackled at an organisational level, e.g. initiatives to streamline planning and reporting or to reduce paperwork and emails. Other issues need to be addressed at a 'local' level where teams are encouraged to find ways of working smarter to save themselves time and enhance work satisfaction.
In some cases it is about helping employees in different work areas understand each other's work and the pressures they face, so that they do not inadvertently make each other's work more difficult.
Workloads
What's the issue?
High workloads, leading to long hours of work on a regular basis, can make getting a satisfactory work-life balance more difficult. This can have a number of causes, including:
- insufficient staff
- high turnover of staff
- delays in filling vacancies
- poorly designed shifts or rosters, so although there are periods of understaffing there are other periods when too many staff are rostered
- inadequate training
- poorly distributed work
- poorly designed jobs
- not addressing the poor performance of some team members.
This typically leads to:
- high stress levels and burnout
- people having difficulty getting home on time
- people feeling that their work is not being valued.
What might you do?
Addressing these issues can have a significant impact on employees' work-life balance. To address this you will need to:
- identify the scope of the issue in your organisation, e.g. is it across the whole organisation or just parts; is it across the whole team or just in specific roles; is it all of the time or just at specific times of the year? (Staff in one unit of an organisation kept a work diary
- for a month to better understand the nature of the problem.)
- identify the cause
- analyse what is within the organisation's influence or control, and what is not
- identify and trial relevant solutions.
Skills and confidence of managers
What's the issue?
Many organisations have found that the more comfortable employees are with talking to their manager or supervisor about work-life balance issues, the more likely they are to be satisfied with their work-life balance. The approachability, skills and confidence of managers in understanding and responding appropriately to work-life balance issues is critical. Typical difficulties include:
- managers not being clear on the organisation's approach to work-life balance, and hence not being sure about how proactive they should or could be
- managers who have been appointed for their technical skills and who are lacking in people management skills
- managers not knowing about existing policies or provisions
- a high turnover of people in supervisory and management roles, and hence a large number of inexperienced managers or people only acting in the role
- managers without the skills and confidence to address these issues
- managers who personally have a poor work-life balance.
What might you do?
Organisations which have addressed this issue have typically put together some combination of the following:
- adjusting role definitions and the recruitment and selection processes for appointing managers and supervisors to ensure that they appoint people with people management skills
- giving managers and supervisors a clear mandate to be proactive in addressing this issue through formal policy statements and/or clear direction from the chief executive
- ensuring that induction training for new managers and supervisors addresses this issue
- running forums for managers to exchange ideas and experiences in addressing work-life balance issues with their staff
- developing case studies or profiles of successful initiatives or approaches to work-life balance issues that are already occurring in the organisation
- including managers' success in facilitating work-life balance in their performance management
- providing managers with the tools, e.g. specific policies, guidelines and resources, to address the work-life balance issues they are likely to encounter
- ensuring that general leadership training encompasses work-life balance issues
- monitoring and, where necessary, addressing the work-life balance of managers
Leave
What's the issue?
Leave typically comes up as an issue when organisations examine work-life balance. This includes:
- when leave can be taken
- difficulties in scheduling leave
- whether there is sufficient cover available while people are on leave
- how much notice is given that leave has been granted
- leave that is withdrawn
- how competing demands for leave are dealt with
- how much leave is available, and is it possible for people to negotiate or buy additional leave
- people not knowing or understanding arrangements related to taking leave or time-in-lieu
- real or perceived unfairness about leave provisions.
What might you do?
A range of strategies can address this issue, including:
- developing clear and transparent principles for approving leave
- streamlining the processes for applying for leave
- prompting employees to apply for leave early, reminding them to think about family, religious or cultural commitments that they may need leave for
- working with employees to identify the times when work demands require that leave will be granted only in emergencies
- developing protocols for negotiating or buying additional leave
- developing a trained pool of casuals or relievers to provide cover while people are on leave
- improving systems and documentation so that people can provide adequate cover while people are on leave.
