Ideas
NS Essay - 'We envy and admire people who negotiate shorter hours - yet there's an overwhelming suspicion that they are ''skiving off'''
Published 13 March 2006
The clamour for work-life balance is pitting employee against employee, argues Viv Groskop, but the thing we need to change most is our fixation with the social status that we associate with work
As a society, our relationship with part-time work is a love-hate one. If it's working for you, you'll arouse a combination of jealousy and suspicion, as well as admiration and awe. After all, who doesn't want more time for their life outside work? But at the same time, who wants to cover for colleagues who insist on clocking off at 4pm sharp and are unavailable on Fridays?
There is a persistent belief that flexible work practices are for the chosen few, suitable only for unambitious maternal types or trustafarian do-gooders in the charity sector. Meanwhile, encouraging a flexible working agenda has been a key motivator of numerous government initiatives, from paternity leave to the "right to request" flexible hours. Yet what have these policies achieved? The recent Women and Work Commission uncovered a pay differential of 41 per cent between men and women in the part-time sector, where women are three times more likely to work than men.
The overall picture is dire for anyone who wants to cut their hours. Regardless of gender or family situation, the clamour for work-life balance is pitting employee against employee in an increasingly desperate long-hours climate - Europe's worst, as we are frequently reminded. Everyone is fighting everyone else for the tiny scraps of flexitime available: parents against non-parents, working mothers against working fathers, employees with caring responsibilities against those who want to take a six-month sabbatical in Mexico.
Some, such as the psychologist Oliver James, see this as a cultural problem, blaming the encroachment of American values and what he calls "the Gordon Brown mentality": "that, in order to be a good person, you must work". His book, Beating Affluenza, due out in September, is an international study of how the importance of working to maintain a material comfort zone is pushing out all other considerations in life and making us thoroughly miserable. We can't be committed to work-life balance, he says, because we aren't comfortable with sacrificing anything materially. Society makes it easy - and supposedly meaningful - for us to be workaholics. "We live in a society where identity is achieved through education and then through profession." To opt out, on any level, is tough. Women are forced to bite the bullet because if they don't do the caring bit no one else will.
There are parallels with Alain de Botton's theory in his book Status Anxiety: "We care about our status for a simple reason: because most people tend to be nice to us according to the amount of status we have. If they hear we've been promoted, there'll be a little more energy in their smile. If we are sacked, they'll pretend not to have seen us." The less we work, the less money we are paid, and the more invisible we become.
Others believe, like the work-life supremo Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Lancaster University, that many businesses have a mental block to part-time work. "A lot of managers don't like it, because it means they have to be able to set objectives very clearly and find a way to monitor people who are not in the office all the time. They think, 'How can I call a meeting if Fred is at home and Janet works from her car?' There are jealousies and worries, too: 'All the work will be dumped on me.'"
Despite this, the business case for part-time hours is being taken increasingly seriously. Surveys conducted in the UK, Canada, New Zealand and the US show that flexible working can increase productivity and staff retention, reduce the number of sick days taken and delay retirement age. So far a lot of this research has been subjective and qualitative. Now, for the first time, profit margins are under investigation. In the UK Cary Cooper is working with the charity Working Families and the Cranfield School of Management on a study of how flexible working influences performance, not in terms of employee perception, but hard cash. The results are due this year. Anecdotally, there are vaguely hopeful signs that things are slowly changing. Vivienne Duke is co-director of Equals One & Encore, a recruitment agency in Leeds that won a Working Families Innovation Award in 2005; it specialises in job-shares for blue-chip companies. Part-time and flexible working is no longer seen as a woman's thing, says Duke, nor is it limited to the lower levels. "There are a lot of organisations that are willing to take the plunge and let people job-share at managerial level," she says. "From the employer's point of view, you are getting two people for one salary, which is no bad thing - especially if they have complementary skills."
What is also driving this, she notes, is the number of men in their fifties and sixties who are looking to re-enter the job market after redundancy and retirement. They do not want to work full-time, nor can employers afford to employ them full-time. Getting their expertise and experience on a part-time basis is the ideal solution: their status and seniority are not compromised. Duke is evangelical about this. She believes that, in future, people will be offered a job and only then asked, "So what hours would you like to work?" She argues that offering flexible hours is becoming an important factor in attracting "the best candidates". If it can also be proven that flexible working improves economic performance, then where's the argument?
In the United States, flexible working is being taken to extremes: companies now advertise positions enthusiastically committed to "Rowe-ing". Rowe, the "results-oriented work environment", is shorthand for "work when you like", and was pioneered by Best Buy, a Minneapolis-based electronics retailer: "People work whenever and wherever they want - as long as the work gets done. There are no work schedules. Nobody counts hours. Meetings are optional." More than 2,000 of Best Buy's 100,000 employees literally choose their own hours, day or night, home or office. (Of course, another way of looking at this is that it represents 24/7 workaholism, in your own time, with the illusion of freedom.) Best Buy has formed a subsidiary which consults with other Fortune 100 companies on how to implement Rowe and "radical flex time".
Principally, it advocates "sludge-dumping": exercises to help employees rid themselves of the mental tics associated with full-time work. If you don't "dump the sludge", you'll still find yourself tutting at colleagues who slope in at 11am or raising your eyebrows at their three-hour lunch break. You need to exorcise your brain of concepts such as skiving and presenteeism. In a survey, Best Buy employees said that "all they really wanted was to be trusted to do their work". In three years, the company says, productivity has risen and stress-related healthcare claims have fallen. This claim is crucial, as Professor Cooper explains. "No moral argument is going to work," he contends. "Businesses may pretend that they care about work-life balance but really you need to be able to demonstrate to them that it makes a difference to their bottom line."
The biggest hurdle? What Cooper calls "inhibitors" - inbuilt resistance to new working practices (or "sludge", to Rowe-ing fans). The belief that part-time work is "something women do" is one inhibitor. The idea that it is for those who are "less committed" to work is another. Cooper also estimates there are natural limits to flexi-working: not everyone is suited to it or wants it. "You will always get workaholics and people who like structure. I think up to 40 per cent of people are like that." The existence of these people - the ones who would never work part-time - forms a conundrum. As long as they exist, work will be an arena for individual competition and ambition. In such an environment, if your colleague chooses to have a child is it your duty to support them at work?
The issue of whether children are a collective or an individual responsibility is one that the government would rather not get into, leaving it up to the Institute for Public Policy Research to warn last month that the "baby gap" - the difference between the number of children women would like to have and the reality - is threatening a demographic crisis. Within decades there will be too few children born in Britain to support all the elderly dependants in this country. Defensive parents describe themselves as producing future taxpayers. Aggressive singletons mutter about population overload.
In some ways why shouldn't child-free employees take the moral high ground in the workplace? One manager (unmarried, in his early forties) tolerates his staff having children, but believes they don't work as hard. "I wonder if their job is as important to them as it was before they had kids," he says. "The fact is, the jobs that pay the most and that offer the most job satisfaction are the ones where the hours are erratic and you need to put in a lot of time."
In most workplaces everyone has a story about how it's only the favoured few at the top of the tree who get to use their "right to request" the hours they want to work. Or the ones who have a "special friendship" with the boss. In a team of 20 just how many can realistically work a three- or four-day week? And once a manager has granted that to five or six working mothers, what will inevitably happen to the three working fathers who also wouldn't mind doing four days? They'll be turned down, of course.
As a society, whether we are parents or not, our attitude to flexible working is oddly schizophrenic. On the one hand, we envy and admire people who have negotiated shorter hours and we aspire to their position. On the other hand, there is still an overwhelming suspicion of anyone who "skives off". Isn't their life just a bit too cushy? Haven't they pulled a fast one?
The backdrop to the Ruth Kelly "paedophiles in schools" row earlier this year illustrated this suspicion perfectly. Once, Kelly's 6pm clocking-off time and her refusal to take home ministerial red boxes were seen as healthy signs of her "sparkling career" and brilliant juggling skills. (Look, a politician who has a life!) Then, all of a sudden, these were pounced upon. Had she overlooked something she might not have missed if she had worked every night until 10pm? One commentator argued that she had wasted valuable time at home when she could have been networking after hours in the Commons bar, forging the sort of alliances that would have protected her in a time of crisis.
This is the killer question that no amount of touchy-feely, politically correct parental-leave legislation will solve. Whilst it might be possible to do a high-level, fulfilling executive job and still clock off at a reasonable hour, isn't there always going to be someone competing against you who will work 24 hours, who will stay up drinking with the right people at the right time, who won't go home to their family or a dying relative, or to a Spanish evening class? And why shouldn't that person reap the rewards of their hard work?
Cultural attitudes are slower to change than employment legislation. Best Buy has got one thing right: the sludge is deeply ingrained. The only solution, argues Oliver James, is to admit the effect this situation is having on our mental health, which, he says, is at an all-time low despite our relative affluence.
James believes that all leaders in business and politics should be forced by law to spend a minimum of two weeks as sole carer for a two-year-old child: this will make them re-evaluate their notions of status, hard work and stress. "You should also have a law that says you cannot work at all if you have a child under three. One or other parent should look after the child full-time." If the government looked at policy from the perspective of mental health rather than economic growth, this would be top of its list, he argues.
What if we all decided that there is more to life than work? In the light of the Women and Work Commission findings, a Sunday Times editorial mused that "maybe women are on to something" by "choosing" a more satisfying work-life balance than men (that is, sacrificing earnings and career prospects in return for a better quality of life). But this is the notorious "choice feminism" argument that has torn the women's movement in two: the theory that it should be valid for women to choose to be full-time housewives or mothers. Work-life advocates argue that we would all benefit from a piece of their supposed contentment. But while we accord zero status to anything less than the full-time, committed, professional path - and make the financial reward derisory - how can that ever happen?
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