Know your organisation

Useful questions to consider include whether your organisation:

• works best with a centralised or decentralised approach
• likes to be a leader or innovator, or is more cautious, preferring to follow the leaders
• responds best to policies and guidelines, or needs motivational leadership
• looks inside or outside the organisation for best practice
• has one predominant culture, or has different parts with quite different cultures which will require further tailoring of your strategy.

One useful way of answering these questions is to identify other successful changes in your organisation and ask:

• Why was the change process successful?
• Are there any lessons from this for your work-life balance strategy?

Formal or informal?

A question debated by many organisations addressing work-life balance issues is whether it is better to have formal policies or to encourage informal practices.

The advantages of informal practices are:

• they don't have to wait for the development of policies and guidelines
• they give innovative managers more scope
• managers don't feel hemmed in by rules and regulations.

Advantages of formal policies are:

• they don't just rely on the skill and good will of managers
• they give managers explicit permission and direction to address the issues
• they ensure more consistent access for employees
• employees know what to expect and are less likely to perceive individuals getting preferential treatment.

The right answer for your organisation will depend on its size, style and culture. The approach taken to work-life balance issues must fit with how you treat other management issues. What is the same for every organisation, however, is that you cannot have rules for every situation. Instead, organisations need to:

• send a clear and consistent message about how it wants these issues to be treated
• give managers a framework for making decisions
• those managers who do it well
• give staff some recourse if they believe their needs are not being fairly considered.

Work-life balance arrangements can be included as part of the provisions in individual or collective employment agreements, and may reflect the way in which hours are scheduled and organised in practice, the need for healthy and safe hours to be worked, and the ability to combine work with private life. This can be as a result of two-way communication, staff consultation and collective bargaining to create meaningful work-life balance opportunities.

Marketing your work-life balance strategy

To effectively market your work-life balance strategy you will need to identify:

• the different audiences in your organisation
• their concerns
• what would convince them
• what strategies to use to gain their support.

The following tables outline some of the things organisations have found when they have done this identification exercise.