[Futurework] Building a better treadmill

[Ed Weick]

More on the world of work.   Ed Ed Weick 577 Melbourne Ave. Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7 Canada Phone (613) 728 4630 Fax     (613)  728 9382 Sunday, February 09, 2003 Job 'perks' make work tougher: study Flex hours, on-site day care only force us to spend more time in workplace Kathryn May The Ottawa Citizen There's no end in sight to the long hours Canadians work. The programs and perks that employers are offering workers to help cope with the colliding demands of work and home will simply make them work longer and harder. Workplace health has become an issue for business and labour alike. They are responding with a slew of "wellness" programs, including healthier food in cafeterias, in-house day care, gyms, diet programs, flexible hours and sabbaticals. But those things are all aimed at making it easier to work and don't get at the root problem -- workload, says Linda Duxbury, a Carleton University business professor who is heading one of the country's biggest studies into the conflicting demands of work and family lives. "There is still no recognition that the systemic issue here is workload and these (programs) make it easier for workers to give priority to work, not to have balance," Ms. Duxbury said. "All these concierge-style services companies are offering, like making your dinner and doing your cleaning, are aimed at making you stay at work and not leave. What good is a flex-time policy if you're working a 60 hour week -- so you can come in before 6 a.m. and leave after 8 p.m.? "They look great on paper but there is a huge gap between policy and practice. Balance means it's easier to work, but also easier to go home." Ideally, a balanced life is like a "seesaw," in which work, family and personal lives rotate as priorities. Sometimes the job takes prominence and you work flat out, but then family moves to centre stage. It's a balance many employers don't get, Ms. Duxbury said. "Balance is when you know you can work 70 hours a week but you expect quid pro quo from the boss when your mother breaks her hip ... But organizations think its quid, quid, quid, and work always takes priority, and that's a cultural problem," said Ms. Duxbury. The National Work-Life Conflict Study is based on a survey of 31,500 workers at 100 major organizations in the private, public and non-profit sectors. It was conducted by Ms. Duxbury and Chris Higgins of the University of Western Ontario and will have seven reports when completed. According to the study, one in four Canadians is now working more than 50 hours a week. The brunt is being borne by managers and professionals who simply can't meet the expectations of their job in the 9-to-5 day they're paid for. With technology, a growing portion of this unpaid work is being done at home, blurring the traditional notion of work and family as "separate worlds" into a hurried, stressful way of living. All these extra hours, which eat into the time devoted to personal and family demands, is affecting the health of working Canadians. Rising incidence of stress, burnout, absenteeism, high turnover, and soaring medical costs are having an impact on the bottom line of Canada's employers and the country's health-care system. "We are trying to have a home life, but we're told to keep learning and get more education or we lose our employability. We don't have job security anymore, we have aging parents and no one is at home full time with the kids. We have no gender division of labour in the workforce anymore, women have half the jobs and men do more at home ... but employers expect us to give priority to work at the expense of everything else," Ms. Duxbury said. "Everything else has changed, but work expectations haven't." With no end in sight, workers are coming up with their own solutions, such as delaying or having fewer children -- or having none at all. Others are turning to religion or some sort of spiritual support, while others are deciding to put their careers on hold. All these solutions have sweeping social and economic implications over the long run. "There is a cost when people are choosing between having kids and creating the next generation of employees," said Alan Mirabelli, executive director of communications for the Vanier Institute of the Family. "We now have people saying 'you are asking too much of me in a work culture that doesn't support that decision.' It's not a selfish act of not having children, but rather a system that doesn't support it." Mr. Mirabelli said business hasn't done its bit to adapt work to the massive changes of the past 25 years. He argues that families were forced to change in the face of double-digit inflation in the early 1980s, when women went to work to help support the household. Today, it takes two incomes to support the same standard of living Dad once provided as the single income earner. At the same time, businesses got "leaner and meaner" and dumped more work on us all. Derwyn Sangster, of the Canadian Business and Labour Centre, said "workplace health" is on the radar of most businesses, and a growing number are realizing that a happy, healthy workforce is key to the bottom line and the ability to keep and attract talent. A recent CBLC survey found labour and business leaders believe the difficulty in balancing home and work is getting worse. They also found "culture," the way a business runs or is managed and how well everyone relates and communicates, were considered far more important to employee health than a "wellness program." But Ms. Duxbury said such programs are "Band-Aid solutions" that will do little until employers wake up and realize they cut too far and too deep during the downsizing of the 1990s and it's time to hire more workers. Downsizing cut people, not work, which was dumped on the plates of the remaining workers. And hand in hand with reducing the workload is getting rid of the "long hours" culture that has become a way of life for the baby-boomer generation. "We have organizational anorexia, not enough people to deal with work ... You can do 60 hours a week for a few weeks or months, but not for the rest of your life, without physical and mental problems." At that point, people wouldn't take risks anymore; "you make mistakes and you get sick," she said. And the most "anorexic" are the front-line middle managers, who were all but gutted by employers in every sector. Managers set the tone and culture and tended to the people side of the business. They are the communicators, the strategic planners, the mentors, the ones who reward and recognize employees. And if they're bad, they are usually the reason workers quit. "We're finding out they weren't useless after all, and were critical to the interface between employees. Managers are the transmitters of culture within an organization and if they're unhappy, stressed and overwhelmed, that's the culture transmitted down the line," said Ms. Duxbury. She argued that today's workaholic long hours culture began with the baby boomers. There were so many of them that long hours was the way to be noticed and promoted. They faced the downsizing of the 1990s and the end of job security, which forced boomers to work even harder to hang onto their jobs. Then came generation X, who had to work just as long and hard, if not more, to compete with the boomers and get ahead. "From the day they started to work, long hours are what boomers did to stay alive. They have treaded water as fast as they could and got nowhere," Ms. Duxbury said. © Copyright 2003 The Ottawa Citizen