Lessons from the Workplace Project: an evaluation of a Work-Life Balance Programme initiative
STAGE 2 REPORT: EXTENDED LESSONS FROM THE WORKPLACE PROJECT
JUNE 2007
Extending the lessons learned
Without in any way seeking to detract from the organisation specific experiences that are documented later in this report, we think that there are six observations that were not quite as clearly expressed in the first report as was evident in this last round of site visits.
In summary:
- 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).
- 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, stock takes, 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.
- 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.
- 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 (crowding out, culture clashes etc.), 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.
- 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 consultant 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).
- 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 be 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.
Key findings: organisational influences
There were clear differences in the detailed experiences of the four organisations, in terms of process, impact, momentum and sustainability. These are outlined in more detail in the sections that follow. 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.
These differences in the experiences on the journey are detailed in the case studies that follow. We conclude this supplementary report by telling a few "stories" in the final chapter to make the general observations specific and human.
Compac
Compac is a medium sized (130 NZ employees) privately owned company which designs and manufactures electronic sorting equipment for horticultural packing sheds. The company has grown in a fairly unstructured way, and has a flexible, laid-back culture. Design and head office functions (including training) are run out of Auckland. There are several offshore manufacturing plants. Production is partly seasonal, and involves tailoring components for each order that comes in. Employees range from semi-skilled (factory floor and stores) to highly qualified (design, IT and technical PhDs). Some employees have to undertake a great deal of travel (which can include extended periods offshore) to install and service plant for offshore customers.
Compac became involved in the project after an approach from the Employer and Manufacturers Association, and had three broad goals: improve morale generally; reduce burnout and turnover in areas that require a lot of travel; make it easier to attract staff.
Issues identified
The project team identified three priority issues:
- Reinforcing and extending flexibility
- Clarifying and addressing some of the travel provisions
- Developing a more active social culture.
Actions recommended for implementation
- Provide feedback to management team as to how important flexibility is to staff
- Provide managers with information on managing flexibility
- Trial staggered start and finish times in fabrication
- Write up clarification of travel allowances and lieu days
- Inform managers about travel arrangements, and managers to meet with their teams
- Investigate recompense for time spent in international travel
- Investigate streamlining planning to improve notice for travel overseas
- Upgrade lunchrooms and courtyard
- Establish and run a workplace forum
- Repeat discussions with staff to gauge reactions and impact of initiatives
- Use best places to work survey as an indicator of impacts.
Actions taken
The forum had a false start when there were no agenda items put forward for the first meeting, and an occasion to try to have another meeting has not arisen. Discussions about travel have tended to be folded into the renegotiation of individual employment agreements. The upgrading of the lunchroom and courtyard await an allocation of resources. Overall, then, the plan was not implemented as envisaged.
Hutt Valley Health
Hutt Valley Health is a secondary hospital with some tertiary specialties (plastic surgery etc). This means that in general, it has more predictability in scheduling its functional activities than, say, Wellington Hospital. However, the consensus view is that in addition to that functional/operational difference, the culture at HVH is more amenable to a responsive and supportive approach to staff wellbeing. "There is a family atmosphere; people want to be there...It's a good place to work...It always has been because it's a part of the community...It is smaller and better managed. It's a friendly and accommodating place to work..." etc. The project therefore worked off a solid platform to start with, and its main impacts were to:
- raise the profile of work-life balance as a workplace issue
- stimulate thinking and alert the participants to different ways of doing things
- set up a process for setting and agreeing priorities on what needed to be addresses
- galvanise people into action.
Issues identified
The main actions identified were those that impacted on work organisation within the workplace, with a very strong emphasis on reducing or managing sources of workplace stress. These included backfilling to cover short-term absences, debriefing following critical incidents, more effective communication, encouragement of teamwork, streamlining low-level problem solving responses to emerging issues, and improving the leadership skills of front line managers.
Actions recommended for implementation
The actions to improve communications were a mix of training and opportunities for more structured dialogue, supported by customised prompts to keep the communication flowing. Better leave planning would not only improve certainty for staff, but would also make the need for backfilling more predictable and more manageable. Teamwork and a more proactive response to emerging problems was to be encouraged through information gathering and through training, under the oversight of the working group which would continue to meet as required. The debriefing process, and resources allocated to it, was to be reassessed.
Actions taken
Action was interrupted as a consequence of loss of key personnel, competing demands from a range of projects and pilots that involved similar issues and similar people, and operational disruptions of various sorts. The working group did meet to revisit the recommended actions and to re-prioritise them, and many of the oversight activities have merged into the bi-partite systems that were established as a result of the most recent collective agreement. Overall, though, the project entered something of a hiatus, and rejuvenation now requires a refocus of attention and the allocation of adequate resource to ensure progress.
Kirkcaldie and Stains
Kirkcaldie and Stains is a traditional (120 year old) department store, with a reputation for high value merchandise and a brand based on formality and service, eg it has a concierge at the door and a pianist in store during lunchtimes, and there is an extensive use of honorifics - "Mr x", "Mrs y" in conversations that take place in a business context. This is presented in a formal Code of Conduct, and standards on dress and personal grooming. It is, though, a seven day operation, and has built a business model on high profile, almost iconic sales ("The Kirks Sale") that are "events" in some circles in Wellington society. The combination of weekend work and seasonal peaks around Christmas and the sales create a need to augment staffing levels beyond those associated with the standard working week.
Issues identified
There were three main issues identified for attention: making sure that staff had easy access to information about options they had to improve work-life balance; making sure that managers had the capacity to work with their staff to facilitate that balance; and ensuring that processes - especially with regard to planning and taking annual leave - were transparent, efficient, and seen to be fair. Kirkcaldies had a pre-existing sensitivity to improving work-life balance, and the common theme that ran through the issues identified was enabling, empowerment and facilitation.
Actions recommended for implementation
The actions recommended were reasonable systematic and structural responses to each issue. Awareness was to be improved by using Employee Advisors more effectively, by preparing pamphlets on specific aspects of work-life balance processes like taking parental leave or requesting changes in hours of work, through an enhanced employee induction programme and by working the issue into all standard booklets, policies and staff meetings. Manager capability was to be improved by making policies, guidelines and rules more explicit, and by rebalancing the content of management training. Leave processes were similarly to be regularised and published.
Actions taken
Implementation was relatively low key and many of the formal and more structured solutions have not been progressed. Examples are the low visibility of the Employee Advisor position and the issue specific pamphlets. Instead, a lot of the responses envisaged have been incorporated into a user-friendly plain English version of the individual employment agreement, and worked into a very comprehensive staff induction process.
Action has been stopped and started again as operational imperatives have distracted attention (stocktaking, new point of sale technology etc), but it is largely organic, and does progress (such as the roll-out of annual leave planning wall charts).
New Zealand Police
New Zealand Police is a national, 24/7 operation with over 10,000 employees. Although the roles between sworn and non-sworn are moving closer there is still a perceived distinction between the two; sworn seen as operational and non-sworn as administrative. Policing operations are decentralised over 12 districts, service centres and national headquarters. Police undertook the project across the whole organisation.
The project was overseen by a representative (by district and function) working group. It involved a very extensive consultation process, with focus groups providing invaluable insights. In particular, they highlighted how vital supervisors were in implementing any work-life balance improvements; drew attention to the levels of stress that were being encountered in the organisation, and underlined a high degree of variation across the different districts.
Issues identified
While the objective specification of the issues Police staff faced related to stress on the job, the project focussed more on the underlying contributors to that stress, such as how key supervisors were acting in noticing and responding to emerging stress indicators, and the very large variations of practice encountered across the country.
The actions recommended all flowed out of a "principles based approach" because it was recognised that it would be impossible to prescribe set process and to outline expected results across the 12 largely (for operational reasons) autonomous districts. Those principles were anchored in the need for more effective leadership, better training, and closer attention to rostering and leave arrangements.
It was recognised that what was ultimately required was a continuous change in the culture (especially of management), and that in turn depended on genuine buy-in from senior management. A "Statement of Commitment" was seen as the starting point to getting that buy-in.
Actions taken
Implementation was slow because senior management had not been "on the journey" throughout, and took a cautious approach in evaluating the full resource and operational implications of committing to the full action agenda. However, an Organisational Health Audit that was carried out independent of the project but coincident with the consideration of its recommendations, both concerned management and validated the core findings from the project as to the underlying cause of workforce stress.
Sharing of experiences with good practice is envisaged as the best way of rolling out improvements across the country and contributing a more gradual improvement in both awareness of, and response to, work-life balance issues.
Stories
"In your own time"
Compac produces specialised fruit sorting and grading equipment, which is customised and fabricated "to order", and not on a traditional production line. Employees work four, ten hour shifts a week, but the workshop stays open for two hours beyond the "standard" shift hours so that (voluntary) overtime can be worked if and when needed. It can also use the Friday to catch up with peak work flows. This creates opportunities to adjust the actual hours of work to fit in with the lifestyle needs of employees.
In one case, an older employee with good skills and direct knowledge of the technology didn't want to keep working 40 hours a week, but did want to keep active and was a valuable resource to the company. He can work 7.30am to 1.00pm and it suits both parties.
In another, an employee became concerned about the peace of mind of his children in the wake of a series of high-profile violent incidents in Manurewa. He didn't want them to go home from school and wait for him to return from work. His manager let him leave the job and pick them up from school, and they waited in the staff cafeteria until he completed his daily hours of work, which he could do by working past the formal shift finish time to cover for the absence during the pick up. All parties accept that this is not a long-term solution, but as an interim stop gap it gives peace of mind.
In a third case, an employee has a partner who travels away from home periodically in the course of her work. When she is away, he starts late and finishes early so that he can drop the children off at school and pick them up. He makes up for the reduced hours either by working on the (nominally unworked) Friday, or by extending his hours when his partner is not travelling.
Part of job
There is always a risk that when special arrangements are made for one employee to fit in with their out-of-work obligations, co-workers can resent what they may see as special treatment, and feel that they have to cover for the anti-social hours and/or more stressful job content that is being redistributed among the workforce.
In the Police, there was an explicit provision for officers to exercise an "FEO" (a flexible employment option) when they had family responsibilities. In the past, this involved taking them off their standard front-line duties, and "finding" work for them to do, and the FEO got a bad name. It was probably counter-productive, because out of collegial loyalty, some staff who really should have exercised the option were reluctant to do so in case they were seen as "taking advantage" of their colleagues!
It is harder to do, but increasingly the emphasis is now going on improving the responsiveness to family obligations within the existing position held by the officer concerned. This meets the need without putting pressure on either the person seeking the flexible option, or on colleagues to cover for the absence when there has been a secondment to a specially created position so that the FEO can be exercised.
Recovery from stressful incidents
An important contributor to enjoyment of life away from work is the ability to "leave the job behind" at the end of the day. This becomes critical at some times of the day when, for example, an employee may finish a shift late at night and then needs to drive home, when a stressed condition increases the direct risk of harm.
Hospital staff encounter "critical incidents" from time to time, when a patient becomes difficult, or the family of a patient become agitated or distressed, perhaps after continued poor health or even in the event of a death. "Debriefing" after such incidents helps impacted employees to talk through the incident in a comforting and supportive way. The process is meant to be non-judgemental and distinct from any personal appraisal mechanism and/or disciplinary procedures which are conducted through other formal policies and procedures.
The work-life balance project at Hutt Valley Health identified the debriefing process as a high priority action item for a work-life balance implementation plan. Concentrating on the process highlighted a number of problem areas: whether debriefing teams should be specialists brought in from outside or drawn from the collegial pool of hospital employees; how those doing the debriefing were to fit this function on top of their standard duties, especially when the incident was at an awkward time of the day or week; and how debriefing can be separated out so that it is a safe process for the staff concerned.
A solution will require a careful reconciliation of conflicting views on best practice, and the allocation of additional resources, but improvements are possible. "Balance" needs a lot more than flexible hours and working arrangements!
The Kapiti Train
People travel from diverse locations to any one workplace, but public transport is not "seamless". Catching one train or bus to a more distant residence can make a huge difference in the amount of commuting time involved. Staff at Kirkcaldie and Stains, who live on the Kapiti coast find that if they catch the 5.15 pm train, they get home a full hour or more earlier than if they get the first available train after the store closes at 5.30!
Kirkcaldie's found that if Kapiti train commuters started at 9.00 am with store set-up duties, and took a half hour lunch, they could finish at 5.00 pm, get the early train, and have that extra hour-plus at home at night: a huge improvement to the quality of life. The company also found that other staff had complementary lifestyle interests, such as dropping children off at school, going to the gym or walking the dog before work, so staggered start and finish times "matched" different lifestyle imperatives.
It takes a bit of effort to work out how to fit these differences together, but it suits both parties: employees get hours of their choice and the store avoids the extra costs of having all staff covering the full stretch of "set-up to closing" hours.