Chapter 5

Work–life balanceWell-being at work and the

tyranny of technology

Work-Life Balance

• conflicting demands people experience when trying to balance their working lives with personal lives

• the term first coined in the 1970s by overworked and stressed individuals in USA downshifting (lowering expectations of material gain in return for working fewer hours)

• became more important issue with more women entering the workplace who still needed to find the time for childcare, housework and family management

Poor Work-Life Balance

• Higher rates of absenteeism • Higher rates of staff turnover• Reduced productivity• Decreased job satisfaction• Rising healthcare costs• Lower levels of organisational commitment

and loyalty

= Poor customer service

Problems of definition• Almost every individual has

own view of and different needs for how to balance life and work

• Organizations find it difficult to address these differences– family-friendly policies (implicit

focus on women with kids)– others who may want further

education, need to take care elderly, spend more time with their pets (any less noble?)

Table 5.2 Individual situations and work–life balance requirements Adapted from Reiter (2007)

Alternative Work Arrangements

• Flextime– Employees work during a common core time period each

day but have discretion in forming their total workday from a flexible set of hours outside the core.

• Job Sharing– The practice of having two or more people split a

45-hour-a-week job (in the book 35 hours because of UK norm)

Another Alternative: Telecommuting• Telecommuting

– Employees do their work at home at least two days a week on a computer that is linked to their office.

• The Virtual Office– Employees work out of their home on a relatively

permanent basis.• Typical Telecommuting Jobs

– Professional and other knowledge-related tasks– Routine information-handling tasks– Mobile activities

Reasons for and against Telecommuting

Advantages– Larger labor pool

– Higher productivity

– Less turnover

– Improved morale

– Reduced office-space costs

Disadvantages• For employer

– Less direct supervision of employees

– Difficult to coordinate teamwork

– Difficult to evaluate non-quantitative performance

For employee• Flexible working is not always beneficial as it may

first appear as it may blur the boundaries between work and time-off.

• from full-time to part-time – often does not reduce work load pressures; as many e-mails, paper work, etc. expected to be done in half time– working as much as full-timers, just not so visibly and

under rewarded– often frustrated with lack of career progression

Table 5.1 Current flexible working patterns Based on Stredwick, J. and Ellis, S. (2005) Flexible Working, CIPD, pp. 118–44.

• Flexible employment is not associated with job satisfaction. Zeytinoglu, Yilmaz, Keser, Inelmen, Uygur & Ozsoy (2013) provides evidence that the perception of job security is the important contributor to job satisfaction for Turkish workers (frontline hotel staff, airline cabin crew, call center staff).

• Women who focused on their careers as opposite to putting family commitments first, reported high level psychological well-being. They were more engaged with and exited about their work (however, they were more workaholic and worked longer hours) (Burke, Koyuncu & Fiskenbau, 2007)

Studies from Turkey

Work Stress• Stress

A dynamic condition in which an individual is confronted with an opportunity, constraint, or demand related to what he or she desires and for which the outcome is perceived to be both uncertain and important

• Types of Stress– Challenge Stressors

• Stress associated with workload, pressure to complete tasks, and time urgency

– Hindrance Stressors• Stress that keeps you from reaching your goals, such as red tape• Cause greater harm than challenge stressors

Demands-Resources Model of Stress

• Demands– Responsibilities, pressures, obligations, and

uncertainties in the workplace

• Resources– Things within an individual’s control that can be

used to resolve demands

• Adequate resources help reduce the stressful nature of demands

Figure 5.1 The Yerkes–Dodson law of optimal performanceSource: R. M. Yerkes and J. D. Dodson ‘The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation’, Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18(5), 1908.

Not All Stress Is Bad

Potential Sources of Stress

• Environmental Factors– Economic uncertainties of the business cycle– Political uncertainties of political systems– Technological uncertainties of technical innovations

• Organizational Factors– Task demands related to the job– Role demands of functioning in an organization– Interpersonal demands created by other employees

• Personal Factors– Family and personal relationships– Economic problems from exceeding earning capacity– Personality problems arising from basic disposition

Individual reactions to stress

• When it comes to implementing stress policies the difficulty is that people have different tolerance levels and different interpretations

• Key areas of stress at work include interpersonal conflict, unrealistic workloads, lack of autonomy and control, lack of managerial support, managerial unfairness, weak management, bullying, harassment, too many changes, lack of role clarity, lack of information..

Table 5.3 Signs and symptoms of stress Source: Adapted from Cooper et al. (1988)

Stressors are additive: high levels of stress can lead to the following

Sexual Harassment

• Any unwanted act of sexual nature that affects an individual’s employment and creates a hostile work environment

• Overt actions, like unwanted touching or recurring requests for date, are relatively easy to spot

• Subtle actions, like jokes or looks, can cross over the line into harassment

• Sexual harassment often isn’t about sexuality: it is about abusing an unequal power relationship– Harassment can damage the well-being of the individual,

work group, and organization

Sexual Harrasment in Turkey• A study of office workers (N=303; 34% male)

(Temgilimoğlu & Tahtasakal, 2004)– 30 % of males (62.5% reported)

– 49 % of females (91.1% reported)

• The project on 170 students who have completed internship from several tourism administration departments in İstanbul

Group Statistics

 

sex N Mean Std. Deviationencounter female 73 9,3014 9,16619 Score over 25

male 97 7,1340 10,94839

Stress and relationships

• Extended work hours also means much less time for intimacy and romance as well as other friendships

• Not surprisingly strong relationships often developed with colleagues

• Not only intimate relationships bot also relations with family members, friends, suffer when we are stressed and over worked.

Coaching for a work-life balance• More and more organizations offer psychological

coaching defined as building awareness, responsibility and self-belief

• either through an internal mentor (has wealth of insider knowledge, lower cost) or with external coaches (free from politics and agendas, often with psychology training, though cost more to the company) to unlock potentials

• to address dysfunctional behavior such as interpersonal conflict, harassment, work load, career change, personal development, time management..

The tyranny of technology – the impact of technology on health and well-being• Mobile technology goes everywhere with us and

penetrates our whole lives.

• Benefits are immense, such as making information instantly accessible, but there are downsides!

• How do you feel when you forget your mobile?– A random sample study revealed that people are anxious

about missing something important, and many felt lost without all of their contacts at hand.

• Social psychologists we have 5-7 close friends, extended networks of about 30-50 including family, and the maximum number of acquaintances -without data overloaded- is about 150 (Dunbar number)

• Some people boast with having 3000+ friends on social networking sites !?

• Friendship needs nurturing and time to develop; many ‘virtual friends’ besides being not real, actually may be a sing of not getting into contact with real people.

The ‘monkey mind’ and death of attention

• a Buddhist term to a ceaseless chattering, now used for a substantial part of social media

• people often fail to realize that the content they are creating is open to others and do not disappear

• even more importantly this constant flow causes a growing inability of people to concentrate

• shortened attention spans in people today blamed on busy lives that we lead information overload and constant stimulation which do not let our minds to relax adds further to lack of work-life balance

How to manage your work-life balance better?

• Learn to say ‘no’-and consider assertiveness training.

• Learn to see guilt as a waste of time and energy.

• Be realistic about what you can do, and what you need to leave undone.

• Learn to delegate. Ask others for help and divide tasks so that you are not the only one responsible for running the office.

• Actively block off some time so you can recharge. Even if it’s just 2 hours a week – use this to swim, take a long walk, see a film..

• Exercise more. This burns off lactic acid, which adds to feelings of stress, and releases endorphins, which make us feel happier and more energetic.

• Write lists – and tick off when you have done something. If you are moving something from one list to the next constantly, delete it – cannot be urgent.

• Develop a good back-up support system of friends, family and colleagues that you can swap emergency cover with and be prepared to offer help.

• Develop strong time boundaries so that other people respect your time as much as you do.