Executive Briefings

Published December 2007

Managing the Balancing Act

Agatha Gilmore

If you thought your workforce was most concerned with paychecks, benefits or corner offices, think again. New research from WorkLifeBalance.com reveals that 81 percent of employees believe a company’s work-life policies influence their decision to accept or quit a job.

Only half of those surveyed, however, felt their companies were supportive of life outside of work.

“Work-life balance is not only a mission-critical business issue,” said Jim Bird, CEO of WorkLifeBalance.com. “It may be, as we continue to prosper, the most mission-critical issue in terms of holding and recruiting great talent. Work-life balance is going to be the key.”

One of the reasons the issue has come to the forefront, Bird said, is because today’s work environment is so drastically different from that of previous generations that a fresh approach to the juggling of professional and personal commitments is required.

“Since 1950, which is a little over a generation ago, the average individual is exposed to over a hundred times as much information or knowledge on a daily basis as her or his parents,” Bird said. Not only is information more widely accessible, thanks to innovations like the Internet, e-mail and the ever-present BlackBerry, he added, but there’s more information to be shared in the first place.

“With that comes an explosion of choices,” he said. “The skill set to create a work-life balance that worked up until 1950, even 1960, doesn’t work anymore. It’s not good enough. It’s not so much the things we need to manage are different — the real difference is we need to be able to have tools that sort us through and make these decisions faster and quicker.”

So, while most companies provide the standard benefits that help alleviate the stress involved in balancing work and life — vacation policies, health care programs, employee assistance programs (EAPs), flexible work schedules and telecommuting — they don’t train employees on how to manage their daily time on and off the job, Bird said.

“When [many executives] think about work-life balances — frankly, justifiably so — they tend to think of it as, ‘They want us to spend more money on benefits; they want us to reduce hours,’” he said. “It’s kind of a cost thing.”

But what 75 percent of employees are actually clamoring for is training, according to the WorkLifeBalance.com study.

“What a lot of [work-life] strategies lack is what the individual can do for himself or herself,” Bird said. “The organization cannot create work-life balance for the individual; the individual has to create it for themselves. What the organization can do is provide skills, tools, training that help the individual better identify, create and then attain their best work-life balance for them.”

These days, that means training all employees on relationship management as well as project administration — skill sets that only the top managers used to need, Bird said.

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