Finding the time for fun

By ESTELLE SARNEY

Toni Laming is single, but she has plenty of other relationships to indulge this St Valentine's Day thanks partly to an enlightened policy at her company to help nurture the private lives of its employees.

A senior manager at business consultancy BearingPoint (formerly KPMG), Laming is one of a new wave of executives and employers promoting the two way benefits of a happy home and work life. That means actively helping their employees to invest more time and energy into their personal relationships, knowing it will make them more productive at work.

"If people are in a positive environment at home, their performance is enhanced at work," says Laming. "So if a workplace can help its employees to maintain their personal relationships, it really will enable them to work better."

She is all for an online survey launched yesterday by the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust, aimed at finding out more about the interaction between paid work and personal relationships. The trust will use results to help workplaces to support employees' relationships with colleagues, partners, friends and family.

Philippa Reed, the EEO trust's acting chief executive, says the benefits are backed up by international research.

"Employees who have happy personal relationships have more energy to handle challenges at work, their morale is higher, they are absent less and, if they feel the employer is helping them to maintain their personal relationships, they feel more loyal to that employer."

It is an area that sometimes requires managers to step in.

"When you have a high performing, highly committed workforce that always goes beyond the call of duty, making sure they get out of the office is not something you can be passive about," says Laming.

She and her other managers try to lead by example - last weekend Laming completed the Coast to Coast multisport event and was training up to 16 hours a week in the lead up.

"My work had to be completed in a certain number of hours, so I had to become even more focused and disciplined.

"If we notice people are not getting out of the office we'll sit down with them and go through why their job is taking so long. Some people just need more encouragement than others to shut down for the day - we just have to say 'Go home'!"

Demanding projects are not rewarded with money, but by giving an employee and their partner a free weekend away or dinner out. Laming adds that the maintenance of relationships with friends and family are just as important for people like her as the time and energy that couples need to give each other outside work. Her office acknowledges this by welcoming the friends of its single employees to Christmas parties and other functions that include partners.

For couples, flexible or reduced work hours are sometimes the answer to relationship tensions that can filter through to work.

If St Valentine's Day had been on a Saturday last year, Jimmy Thompson might have been at work, fretting about how he was going to get all his personal projects done around his full time job.

This year, he's spending this couples' day with his fiance, Stephanie Seager, feeling more relaxed at home, and positive at work than he has in years. The difference? He is working only three days a week, with the blessing of his boss, associate head of Unitec's design school, Nick Charlton.

"Jimmy has been with the design school for quite a few years and is a valued member of staff," says Charlton of his lecturer-turned-metal-work-design technician. "He is getting married this year and is building a house, and that's a pretty important stage in someone's life. We wanted to acknowledge that and hang on to him if we could."

Thompson says before approaching his boss he had been feeling overburdened and stressed.

"I've got a lot of building projects I want to get finished before Stephanie and I start a family next year, and wanted to work on those as well as spend time with her."

Seager adds that the latter wasn't happening.

"I never saw him. It came to a head when I went to yet another social gathering and everyone was asking where he was. I had to explain he was doing this or working on that. I had a bit of a hissy fit and said we had to be seen as a couple. How could we make more time?"

Thompson feels Charlton and Unitec have been generous and accommodating and says he will happily repay that by going the extra mile when he is at work, and in long term loyalty. Seager says the change in her fiance was instant.

"The pressure lifted and Jimmy immediately spent less time doing work stuff in the weekend and giving more time to us."

Says Thompson: "There's no doubt that being happy at work makes you feel happier and less stressed at home."

A few employers, such as the University of Auckland, are taking this seriously to the extent that they will pay for relationship counselling for employees facing strife at home. Philippa Reed of the EEO trust says this makes good business sense.

"The skills that can be developed through relationship counselling are what people also need in the workplace when dealing with colleagues and clients - communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, role modelling, positive reinforcement."

For many, their relationship problems would have partly stemmed from work, anyway. In a survey last year by Relationships Australia, 38 per cent of respondents said that lack of time to spend together was an issue negatively affecting their relationship with their partner.

Rearranging work hours was the most common strategy to solve this, although only 17 per cent had managed it.

Notably, long work hours and the stress brought home from work were identified as problems often by workers' partners.

In a British study, 20 per cent of those aged under 30 said that long hours had caused a relationship to break up. Of 5000 managers, 79 per cent believed that the long hours they worked damaged their relationship with their partner.

Statistics New Zealand labour figures show that last year, 48 per cent of men and 19 per cent of women usually worked more than 40 hours a week.

Among the companies combating this is S.C. Johnson, whose senior managers model the limiting of long work hours, and run regular staff surveys on work/life balance. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu offers coaching on workload management to ensure more time out for employees.

Reed says such initiatives help to make companies "employers of choice" in these days of skill shortages, when there is competition for recruitment and retention of good people.

When it comes to transferring employees, bosses need to be aware that many workers are "dual career couples". Efforts should be made to help the employee's partner to also transfer or find a new job.

Even if the partner is at home with children, she may be reluctant to move from schools and established networks. Commuter relationships are stressful and should also be ruled out. At worst, the time apart should be shorter, not longer. Time and funding for regular reunions should be part of the deal.

Thompson and Seager, are happy they can finally get together while living in the same city. "We have been doing more things together than we have in ages," says Seager.

Adds Thompson: "I've always felt that Nick and Unitec were good employers - there's flexibility on both sides.

"It's that sense of give and take that makes the difference."

Lifting pressure

How employers can help workers' relationships:

Limit long work hours.

Provide training on managing workloads and time.

Provide flexible work hours, including part-time options in the short or long term.

Explore working from home options.

Limit or ban cell phone and email intrusion during personal time.

Hold meetings in core work hours only.

Restrict work-related travel to work time.

Minimise out of town assignments.

Make promotion available without relocation.

If relocating someone whose partner works, assist in also finding them employment.

For shift workers, involve them in rostering decisions, allow shift swapping, subsidise home modifications and childcare to improve their sleep, allow regular evenings and weekend days off, and minimise last-minute call-ins.

Provide sick leave to attend to sick family members.

Encourage attendance at children's special events.

Include friends in work-related social events.

Provide time and funding for relationship counselling.

Consult staff about work-related issues affecting their relationships.

Senior managers should role model these practices, and train middle managers in awareness of how work impacts on relationships.

* Each of these examples have been implemented by various companies which have entered the EEO Trust's Work/Life Awards in recent years.

Equal Employment Opportunities Trust