The Work-Life Balance Trust
An independant charity, with no political affiliations
LAST WORDS FROM SHIRLEY CONRAN
Work-life balance means different things to different people and different things at different stages of life. However any definition for anyone must include the problems of lack of time and exhaustion. Research indicates that failure to achieve the correct balance of effort and rest, is linked to a feeling of lack of control over your workload, plus lack of energy to fulfil personal goals and commitments. If the balance is wrong, the result may include fatigue, poor performance and a poor quality of life; this can result in dysfunctional employees, children and families.
Now for a few new facts of life: the high cost of stress to Britain
- 1 in 5 young people have a stress-related health problem - 10% of these are severe. The trend is downward. (Source: Young Minds 2003).
- 80% of visits to British doctors are stress-related. (Source: NHS).
- In 2001, the NHS bill for stress-related illness was £2 billion a year. Such money might be better spent on something else. (Source: NHS).
- In 2001, 6,428 companies were forced to pay out on stress-related damages claims with an average award of £51,000 (Source: The Times Newspaper, 5th August 2003).
- 30% of sick leave is partly the result of stress-related anxiety and depression. Stress-related sick leave costs British Industry £12 billion every year (Confederation of British Industry, quoted in DTI book of case studies 2003). So British goods costs more than they should, in the competitive global market.
- 5-10% of GNP is the cost of stress-related illnesses to the British economy (Source: Professor Cary Cooper of The School of Management, UMIST, and WLB guru).
At that time, I identified 12 causes for lack of W-LB, each with subdivisions, each overlapping. 3 different ministries were involved: NHS. DTI, DFES (Education and Skills) and there was a lack of joined-up thinking. I quickly discovered that the Labour Government was doing all it dared, without risking the masculine vote, because at that time W-LB was seen - wrongly - as a women's issue.
When we held our first conference at the Savoy, attended by 500 people, I also discovered that there were very few enlightened British firms, such as Vodafone and BT, who found that W-LB consideration quickly showed a profit, improved retainment, and so reduced recruitment costs. Introducing home-working saved BT millions of pounds in its first year.
Most Boardroom directors didn't understand the problem and weren't interested in it. Their attitude was, if you can't stand the heat, get back to the kitchen. Time off for stress was really due to hangovers and laziness, they grunted. Any voluntary involvement by them with Work-Life Balance was - and still is - cosmetic at best: a subscription to Working Families and Opportunity Now, so that they couldn't be accused of disinterest.
The dinosaur became extinct because it couldn't adapt. After four years of trying to alter the mindset of the Boardroom dinosaurs, I gave up. We will just have to wait for the dinosaurs to die out, after which their places will be taken by a new generation of modern, involved men and women who understand that a stressed workforce is a counterproductive one.
After that, the W-LB Trust focused on a bottom up approach. We planned to increase the voluble demand for flexible working by influencing those already at the bottom of the workplace, and those who would be Britain's next labour force: graduates and others at workplace entry, plus school leavers.
We did this by holding three annual, national Work-Life Balance Weeks. In 2001 we launched the Workplace Initiative, working with HR directors in the companies we were targeting. The aim of our first Work-Life Balance Week focused on the workplace and aimed to increase employer awareness of the bottom line benefits of work-life balance practises, and also to demonstrate how everyone from Boardroom to shop floor, can improve the balance in his or her life.
The second Work-Life Balance Week in 2002 focused on the problems of family carers - of children, the elderly, the ill and disadvantaged. By the third Work-Life Balance Week in 2003, when we focussed on workplace entry, and school-leavers and late returners, over 3 million workers were involved, together with Girton College, St Paul's Girls School and the William Morris Academy, Hammersmith.
The School Leaver's Conference was our biggest success. The speakers were not only a bunch of enthusiastic professors, but successful young people reporting from wherever the action is for young people: Nightclub owner and entrepreneur Joel Cadbury; 2 chefs from Jamie's Kitchen; Alexandra Jay, the lead singer in "Mamma Mia"; and TV star Diane Louise Jordan. They all pointed out that Work-Life Balance doesn't mean NO WORK. They all said, spend time finding out what you really want to do and then pursue it with passion. And work as hard as you can when you're young, because you won't have as much time after you get domesticated.
The Trust Committee feel that we have now completed our assignment. In 2005, after six years of effort, the leading political parties are aware that they cannot ignore the work-life-balance issue, and it is on the agenda of the major political parties in Britain. However, work-life-balance is not yet with us, and the related problems are likely to get worse: the future projection for Britain is that there will be more old people who need care, but fewer young people to provide it. So more stress for everyone, which might lead to more illness.
Why will there be fewer young people in the workplace? One reason may be that some intelligent young women are deciding not to have children. They know the cost of childcare. They look around their workplace and see the stressful life that the working mothers lead. They realise that Britain has an unsupportive inefficient infrastructure. The NHS is bursting at the seams, the transport system is chaotic and homes are too expensive for many first-time buyers. The young women decide that they don't want that existence. They don't want to give up their freedom, their money and their quality-of-life for fifteen years for the benefit of someone they haven't met - an anonymous baby.
On the other hand, some unintelligent young teenagers are having babies: Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe. Any racehorse breeder could tell you what effect will that will have on the IQ of Britain's future labour force.
And what of young fathers? A "Management Today" survey revealed that 50% of managers who were fathers didn't get more than 5 minutes a day with their children. Some of them have started to wonder why they are working so hard, to pay for children that they never see. Such fathers will increasingly demand sane working hours, until industry drops the counterproductive Long Hours Culture.
It's not difficult to project that eventually women will get equal pay and equal opportunity and patriarchy will disappear, although sexism won't. Eventually inclusion will not be a buzzword, but a fact. Britain will become used to being a multicultural society and will be legally obliged to create work opportunity for the handicapped. And eventually the workplace will be forced by law and public opinion to become more humane than it is at the moment.
But this will only happen if we all keep on pushing for it: at voting booths, at home, in the workplace, in public, at parties. People think that once they've won their rights, then the battle is over. "But it isn't", Barbara Castle, one of Britain's first women MP's once told me "When you've finally got your rights, you've still got to keep fighting for them - or you'll lose them. You must never stop".
PRESIDENT: Shirley Conran OBE
TRUSTEES: Lindsay Cook Janet Fitch Sandra Hepburn
PATRONS: Gillian Ayres OBE The Baroness Brigstocke CBE Professor Petruska Clarkson Elaine Clifton
Professor Nigel Coates Jasper Conran Sebastian Conran Dr Dennis Friedman Kathy Gilgunn Richard E Grant
Felicity Green Hill Lady Irvine Lynda La Plante Prue Leith OBE Nonie Niesewand Sian Phillips
Mary Quant OBE Maureen Rice Professor Andrew Samuels Professor Jane Somerville Christopher Ward
Michael Wolff Peter York Jennifer d'Abo Girton College St. Paul's Girls' School William Morris Academy
W-LB Trust Charity Commission Registration No. 1088149
'Work-Life Balance Week is organised and run by W-LB Limited (Company No. 4154218) with the assistance of a media-based Advisory Committee. For projects which are charitable, the company receives financial and other assistance from Work-Life Balance Trust, registered charity no. 1088149'