Policy, procedure, practice and plate-spinning - how to achieve a work-life balance

Posted by Susanne Nichol, Better Health at Work Award Programme Coordinator, Northern TUC

I regularly wish for an extra hour in the day, or a day in the week and I even more regularly feel like my frenetic movement from place to place whilst grabbing various coats, bags, children, laptops, papers and other extraneous articles is accompanied by the Benny Hill theme tune. And I know that I am absolutely not alone in this daily plate-spinning, multi-tasking blur that is reality for the vast majority of parents, carers – and well, everyone else!

However, I am fortunate to work for an employer that has a raft of measures in place to help me restore some balance. For example, having flexi-time means I can get a much needed hit of endorphins by going to the gym or out for a power-walk on my lunch hour, or before I have to sprint through the school gates lest my youngest child becomes an accidental boarder.

The Better Health At Work Award (BHAWA) is a regional flagship public health programme that is the result of a long-standing (currently celebrating a decade of making workplaces healthier), progressive partnership between 11 of the regional local authorities. This was evaluated in 2012 by Durham University, received a RAND Europe award in 2018 for its impact on health and wellbeing, and due to cross-organisational working between Local Authority specialist public health practitioners, academics and Fuse, was a featured element in the Prevention stream of the recently awarded regional NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) funding.

As BHAWA Coordinator I have contact with literally hundreds (currently over 400) workplaces across North East England and Cumbria, who cumulatively employ nearly a quarter of a million workers. One of the mandates of the BHAWA is that participants survey their staff biennially (at a minimum) and ask them what topics/ issues they’d like to see addressed or get more information/ support on and more often than not, work-life balance is ubiquitous in the top 5.

To me, this presents more of a challenge for both employer and employee than some of the other regular top 5 entries such as healthy eating, physical activity and mental health. Work-life balance encompasses all of those things and more, and whilst the application of all health topics is subjective, this even more so, as we all have our fulcrum in a different place – with a large measure of economics thrown in. Most of us would like to work less time for the same pay, but currently business demands and finances often make this unviable; conversely, whilst going to 3 days instead of 5 might give you perfect work-life balance, most of us wouldn’t be able to sustain a 40% reduction in salary.

Unfortunately, there is no quick fix or magic wand. However, there are multiple ways and means to mitigate work-life imbalance and to actively facilitate a redress in the right direction. The BHAWA takes a holistic approach to workplace health that emphasises making positive changes to all aspects of the workplace, from the infrastructure and logistics, to the pervading culture of staff and management engagement and interaction – and everything in between.

So, how do they do it and what does ‘good’ look like? Well, based on my six years of experience I can safely say that the best employers take a wholesale approach and embed health and wellbeing into the holy workplace triumvirate of policy, procedure and practice.

It all starts with having fit for purpose policies in place, specifically such as Flexible Working; one of our workplaces operates a best practice ‘Adult Working’ policy, which is uber-flexible, employee-led and based around a mutually trusting relationship, so if Costa is a conducive place for them to deliver their work in between school-runs or meetings, then so be it. More and more participants are also introducing ‘stuck not sick’ policies that allocate a bank of ‘reserve’ hours that people can use to deal with unexpected issues, such as an ill child or a flooded kitchen.

Then there are underpinning procedures like regular and supportive line management, meetings/1-2-1s that start with the question ‘How are you?’ which allows for an open dialogue and an easier conversation around any issues and hopefully a subsequent resolution. But, what is of paramount importance is the active implementation of policy and procedure. If an employer has the best policy in the world, yet nobody actually knows about it, then it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. Awareness, buy-in, good communication/training and a practical approach is imperative here.

Having managers who are properly supported to understand and apply the policy in practice is fundamental. They can do this in various ways; by advertising jobs as flexible from day one, supporting a range of flexible working options such as home-working, flexi-time, or compressed hours; reminding colleagues that they can (and should) take their lunch break/leave and can attend medical appointments or workplace campaigns or activities like on-site flu jabs, or a lunch-time yoga class, without it being detrimental to pay.

One thing is for certain - work-life balance is for life and not just for a week



Image:

1.  'plate spinning' by Clancy Mason via Flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0): https://www.flickr.com/photos/clancy123/1805082629
2. 'I'm working through my lunch hour. Work - life balance survey' by David Austin via University of Kent, British Cartoon Archive (Reference number: 84983, Published by: The Guardian, with thanks to Copyright holder: Janet Slee): https://archive.cartoons.ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=84983