Overview

The Government established the Work-Life Balance Project in 2003 to develop "an integrated and coordinated policy programme to promote a better balance between paid work and life outside work." The Department of Labour initiated a Work-Life Balance Programme in 2004 including a broad-based survey of needs and issues and other policy work.

A key element of this programme was the "Workplace Project" originally conceived as an action-research project. A mix of 14 public and private enterprises were selected to receive consultant and other support in undertaking a range of work-life balance projects that would be of benefit to them. This was also intended to inform the development of tools and resources and to assist the Department to better understand the interaction between policy and practice in this field.

The Project was also based on principles of partnership between employers, unions and the Government with the intention of achieving "win-win" solutions for all involved. A fuller description of the Workplace Project and the participating organisations is in appendix 1.

In 2007 the Department began an evaluation of the Workplace Project. This was not intended to be a formal audit of the Project, but rather an exercise to draw out the lessons learned from it - what worked, what didn't, what momentum it created, what factors contributed to positive results, what the experiences of these organisations contributed towards the preparation of generic resources and toolkits that can promote work-life balance more widely and so on.

The evaluation was carried out in two stages by Innovation & Systems Ltd. This summary represents an amalgamation of the findings from the two stages. The full reports for both stages are attached to this summary.

The aim of the evaluation was to examine:

1. the process used, including those parts of the process that were successful, intended and unintended outcomes of the process, and an assessment of what parts of the process might be improved or done differently;
2. the impact of the initiatives, against specific measures set by the organisation, or against expected outcomes, and on factors such as morale, productivity, communications, absenteeism, recruitment, staff turnover, hours worked and so on; and
3. the sustainability of work-life balance initiatives in workplaces over the longer term.

The first stage of the evaluation, undertaken in 2007, covered six of the participating organisations. These were Christchurch Casino, City Care, the Education Review Office, EziBuy, Indeserve and Tip Top Bread. The six organisations were chosen by the Department on the basis that they were furthest along with implementation.

In 2008 the Department extended the evaluation to cover a further four organisations - Compac Ltd, Hutt Valley Health, Kirkaldie and Stains Ltd, and the New Zealand Police.

In addition to extending the catchment to see if there were insights and lessons that had not been captured in the first report, the extended evaluation explicitly aimed to identify the differences between the experiences of these four organisations and those of the other six with special regard to the features of:

• a large public sector organisation with a wide range of occupations and work practices;
• a company with a hi-tech export focus;
• a process that was aligned to other changes taking place in the organisation; and
• an emphasis on management seeking to independently identify the initiatives that could be taken to improve work-life balance.

The progress of the final four organisations will not be evaluated as the general validity of the findings from the first stage has been confirmed by the findings from stage 2. Descriptions of all organisations participating in the Project are in the stage 1 report.

Method

The method adopted by the evaluation team for both stages involved developing a model of what success would look like based on the perspectives of different stakeholders. These stakeholders included the Department of Labour, Business New Zealand, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and the consultants who worked with the participating organisations.^[1]

The evaluation team then conducted interviews with a representative (given resource limitations) cross-section of the selected enterprises to gain an understanding of the actual experience of their work-life balance projects. The overall findings of the evaluation are a reconciliation of this "top-down and bottom-up" approach. In addition the aim of stage 2 was to see if there were insights and lessons that had not been captured in the first stage and to explicitly identify the differences between the experiences of the organisations in stage 1 and stage 2.

What constitutes success?

While there are obvious differences between the stakeholders as to what constitutes "success" there is significant common cause around what "success" would look like.

Six common themes emerged. The table below sets these out and compares them with the results from field work.

Key findings from stage 1

Impact

• There were relatively few baseline quantitative performance measures extracted at the start of the Project so it is difficult to evaluate the impact in hard cost-benefit terms. However, where hard indicators were used they tended to show little change before and after the project, and/or were explained by other factors in the operating environment. This is understandable: work-life balance is only a small part of the overall operation of any organisation; many of the benefits expected to flow from it are intangible (reduced stress, improved personal well-being) and changed outcomes would emerge slowly over a number of years. Again, this has implications for both the Department and employers in terms of setting expectations and promoting such projects.

For example, the Education Review Office has a tradition of working parties, a formal partnership agreement with the union, and has worked progressively to address work-life balance. Despite this, average hours worked have varied by less than one hour over the last four years, and staff turnover has remained locked in a narrow 11- 12 percent band. The nature of the job can dominate work practice, and even if processes make a material and appreciated change to the quality of work, it will not always show up in hard-wired measures.

• Small additive changes were the strongest feature of the responses. Indeed some of the successes quoted did not require any change but simply a clarification of existing entitlements and facilitating easier staff access to them (eg via more aware line managers). Knowing that flexibility can be accommodated and where the boundaries are contributes to greater certainty and a sense of well-being. In this context, enhanced awareness of work-life balance as a real workplace issue was widely experienced. A number of simple and often quite small changes make a real difference!

Small initiatives that were highly valued include:

- ERO changed their vehicle policy to allow garaging at employees' homes before reviews, reducing lost personal time collecting vehicles;

- The Casino clarified and communicated existing entitlements to do with leave and changing shift arrangements;

- EziBuy found out about available childcare and holiday programmes, negotiated employee group discounts for services, and put up information stands with pamphlets about leave entitlements, childcare, exercise programmes etc;

- Tip Top's general manager invited shop floor workers to the corporate box for rugby matches; and

- Compac organised a family outing to the movies.

• There was a tendency for projects to have a relatively narrow focus on hours of work, shifts and leave provisions rather than the wider agenda of the content of work, work processes, and the structure of supports which affect the quality of the work experience.
• For reasons outlined above, there was little evidence of changes in workplace "culture" arising from these projects. Some structural and operational changes may lead to cultural changes over time once they become embedded, but it is unrealistic to expect such change over the life-time of these projects. A further dimension to note is that the project process, in some instances, has lead to positive workplace experience of participative processes and joint project work that may be used on other issues in the future. So the potential for significant cultural shifts remains.

Sustainability

• Whether or not these projects have embedded at a workplace level an awareness of work-life balance issues and a predisposition to developing initiatives to address them is difficult to determine so soon after their conclusion. However, it is clear that in some cases the ripples created by the project have long-since disappeared while in others the projects have opened up important issues for examination and a search for solutions. How long this momentum can be sustained may depend on management and key staff member turnover as well as how long it takes to find satisfactory answers.
• Overall, work-life balance practices in New Zealand workplaces are not so wide-spread as to have reached a "tipping-point." However, the cumulative knowledge and learning from this project and other experience does contribute significantly to the resource base from which new and perhaps broader initiatives might be launched. The key issue is whether the will is there amongst tripartite partners to persist with such initiatives. In our view, there is certainly sufficient comfort (albeit with somewhat more realistic expectations about what is achievable) to be drawn from the experience of the Workplace Project by all parties, to justify on-going investment in work-life balance as part of a broader workplace development agenda.
• Sustaining changes of this nature and maintaining momentum are perhaps the most important challenges in the workplace development arena both within enterprises and for initiating change agencies. Building on and institutionalising knowledge gained rather than having to reinvent processes on each occasion is key.

Key findings from stage 2

The first report noted that because the evaluation covered six of the fourteen participating organisations, there was a risk that it might not have captured all of the lessons that could have been extracted from the Workplace Project.

The evaluators did not think that this was likely because:

• The six organisations were varied by size of organisation, sector (private/public), industry, geographical location, degree of unionisation, ownership structure and workforce characteristics. If there was a slight bias it would be that union densities in the 14 organisations were somewhat higher, on average, than those in the sample.
• While there were some major and many nuanced differences between the sites, our experience was that new insights and contradictions of earlier lessons were subject to diminishing returns, and we were confident that a more extensive evaluation would only have made a marginal difference to these conclusions.

The extended evaluation did generate some additional insights, and these are reported below. However, it did confirm the general validity of these observations in the first report. Significantly, the later evaluation revealed that the results that flowed out of a work-life balance initiative were shaped by the pathway that the initiative followed rather than the institutional structure of the organisation itself.

Extending the lessons learned

Without in any way seeking to detract from the organisation specific experiences, we think that there are six observations that were not quite as clearly expressed in the first stage as was evident in this last round of site visits. In summary:

1. Timing is everything.

   It is very difficult to create and sustain momentum on work-life balance if the organisation is not ready for it. This applies particularly to management, because ultimately managers are those with the authority to make changes, but equally if the staff are not sufficiently concerned or motivated to change, a work-life balance project can be seen as going through the motions. The accompanying apathy applies a dead hand to the concept and makes it more likely that it will move down the list of priorities for action.

   The implications of this are awkward. It is difficult before the event, to know if the time is right, and resources can be wasted (or generate limited results) if deployed in an exploratory way. "Appetite" is, therefore, something that needs to be assessed at the front-end in making a decision to embark on a work-life balance initiative (whether that start is through a government agency or by an organisation independently).

2. Crowding out.

   This is different to timing. Organisations have "busy" business as usual times (say with the renegotiation of collective agreements, annual personal performance appraisals, stocktakes, preparation of annual reports) and have to respond to unplanned disruptive events (working around a strike, dealing with a high profile media event or government initiated enquiry).

   Even if an organisation is ready to address work-life balance issues, it can find that it doesn't have the time to apply dedicated resources to progressing them, and the project stalls. Restarting the project can be difficult because enthusiasm has waned in the meantime, and a degree of cynicism has set in.

3. Clash of cultures.

   The persona of an organisation can change as new recruits with different expectations enter and this group grows in size and influence alongside the entrenched old guard. It can also change as expectations about process and performance are imposed on it through owner or management expectation or public pressure. These culture changes can cut both ways: the new culture can be a "rights based" one, and cramp a more relaxed existing tradition of flexibility and accommodation of personal needs; or it can be one requiring flexibility and responsiveness and clash with an established tradition of firm rules and fixed processes.

   Work-life balance tends to work best if it is systemic and universal, but if expectations (of both different staff and different managers) diverge, the end result is not so much a patchy application of change as no change at all.

4. Top level buy-in.

   There is no consistent practice with work-life balance projects: some are initiated with full endorsement from senior management and others are constructed through mid-level management and employees and "recommended" to the top level decision makers. There is no guarantee that just because top management has bought into the project at the outset there will be a seamless implementation, but where the route selected is to report to senior management, it seems much more likely that there will be delays, second-guessing of the implications for the organisation, a cautious response and a feeling of frustration and disempowerment within the project team.

5. Use of focus groups.

   Survey results do produce "action lists" for any work-life balance project group to work off, but in these latest cases there was serious doubt cast on how self-contained they actually are. Well structured focus groups conducted by peers after careful preparation, and coaching by the consultants, at times set aside survey based priorities and typically were vital in sorting out priorities for attention.

   Solid focus group information gets to the heart of "what really matters", and makes the project more relevant, even if at times it might generate some sensitive conclusions (especially where it is critical of management competencies and responsiveness).

6. Management training.

   The first report did identify the importance of adequate briefing of managers who might have to implement new processes, and wrapped that up under a more generic heading of improving communications. In some of the later studies, however, it was identified that management attitudes can be a fairly rigid barrier, in turn generating a reaction that stops progress with more flexible and responsive practices.

   The management training agenda needs to set more broadly, and applied and monitored more comprehensively (not just to the willing) if work-life balance is to extend beyond pockets within any organisation.

Organisational influences

There were clear differences in the detailed experiences of the four stage 2 organisations, in terms of process, impact, momentum and sustainability. However, these differences did not tend to arise out of differences in their structure or function: whether they were large or small, public or private sector, export orientated or selling in the domestic market.

Rather, the differences emerged from the pathways they selected, and the nature of the journeys they undertook: how early on they engaged senior management; how directly they saw work-life balance as a part of the way work is organised; what methods they used to refine the issues that the staff surveys had identified; and what priority was attached to applying resources to follow up on working group recommendations.

Implications - generic resource

The success of any fresh work-life balance initiatives will be enhanced by paying attention to the lessons drawn from this Project. One of the objectives for the evaluation was to sift out best practice to assist in developing toolkits, to help develop customised solutions and to assist with a wider dissemination of resources.

These projects generated a number of positive outcomes and valuable lessons that can be incorporated into more generic resources and inform any future project design and management. These are spelt out in detail in the stage 1 report.

The key messages can be summarised as:

• Leadership and commitment from the "top" is critical - key to pitching of resource material and project set-up.
• If an external consultant is involved, scoping the workplace first to ensure the best fit and engagement will be more productive.
• Timing of initiatives (when enterprises are ready) and selection of appropriate projects will tend to lead to more lasting benefits - a readiness checklist may be useful at the front-end.
• Raising awareness in the workplace is close to being a sufficient condition for positive change - resources can focus more on consciousness-raising and providing examples rather than prescriptive detail.
• Process is important in improving structures and systems that enable greater work flexibility and in demonstrating respect for employees - a process-oriented tool kit is a viable consequence of this project.
• There is an important skill component to assisting people get on top of their work (communication, problem-solving, time management) and improving the quality of the work experience can have positive win-win spin-offs.
• Attention to communications is essential for knowing what entitlements are available and to adjusting workloads and patterns - a basis for practical toolkit examples and suggestions.
• A lot of little things make a noticeable difference - organisations don't need to completely re-engineer!
• Thoughtful use of rewards and recognition can be hugely motivating - experience between enterprises can be shared through virtual and actual networks.
• Predictability of hours is very important - the key message is about demonstrating the value of showing courtesy and respect to staff as adults with responsibilities and lives to lead outside of work.
• Training managers in both the potential benefits of work-life balance and how that might be achieved with changes in work organisation is a missing ingredient - a companion guide to line managers may be a useful additional resource.

For example, EziBuy's Human Resources team put great effort into selling the benefits of the work-life balance process to managers. Such was the buy-in that initiatives were explored and implemented well before the project action plan was finalised.

It is worth noting that at this juncture in New Zealand work-life balance driven changes in work practices are more likely to be acceptable if they enhance business performance. Thus far, there has not been broad acceptance that there may need to be changes in the way business is conducted in order to improve work-life balance. This suggests there may be a second set of questions that need to be posed at some stage about how and in what circumstances work-life improvements may drive changes in business practices.

For example, one of the aims of Christchurch Casino in getting into the project was to reduce staff turnover. Turnover was 43 percent per annum, which is not high by the standards of the hotel industry, but was compared with Sky City. After the project it fell to 33 percent but has now drifted back up to 39 percent. There is no way of knowing if the fall and/or later rise in turnover was in any way impacted by the project, or what aspects of the project had any impact.