Inflexible employers lose that extra juice

By JULIE MIDDLETON

It doesn't matter how solid your company's equal opportunity and flexibility rules are - they can be undermined by managers who have not thought about how to transform policy into practice.

That's the message from Australian work and life expert Juliet Bourke, a lawyer specialising in discrimination law who was in New Zealand this week to update members of the EEO Trust on work and life issues.

The gap between policy and practice in how companies handle employees' need for flexibility is a fundamental issue, says Bourke, a co-director of Sydney management consultancy Work+Life Strategies and responsible for developing legislation to protect workers with family responsibilities across the Tasman.

She says that "managerial intervention" can have a profound effect on how workers make decisions where there may be a conflict between life and work.

"You may have state-of-the-art policies to make yourself an employer of choice - but the thing is, how are they lived in the organisation?"

It may seem obvious that in a situation with several possible outcomes, managers have a lot of influence. But a new study has delved deeper. United States academic Shelley MacDermid of Purdue University interviewed 55 husbands and 56 wives, presenting them with 16 scenarios, each setting up a conflict between work and home.

Here is one of them:

You've been asked to attend a surprise birthday party for a parent, to be held at your home this Saturday. However, you have been asked to work overtime that day with other project team members to meet a deadline for a vital project on which you play an important role. You can't do both.

Your manager, who has generally been supportive of your need to meet your family responsibilities, insists that your participation in this overtime is critical.

Your spouse, who has been generally unsupportive of your need to meet your work responsibilities, sees your participation in this overtime work session as desirable but not critical.

What do you do?

The study found that the pressure - or support - offered by managers when there's a work/family clash matters, especially to Dads.

Of those men who experienced what they described as "low" pressure from their bosses, 83 per cent would choose to attend the family event. Of those who suffered "high" pressure to stay at work, just 42 per cent would elect the family event.

Manager support also influenced fathers' choices: 83 per cent of those given high support would choose the family do, but just 9 per cent of those getting little support.

Bosses' reaction also affects women's choices, but not as much as for men, says Bourke.

Why? The average workplace is probably more used to women taking time out to care for others, and possibly "women are more impervious to pressure", says Bourke. Men might be more tied into a stay-at-work "breadwinner identity".

What's the end result of too much pressure from bosses to put work first?

In the long term, increased turnover: talented people in search of a life outside work will slip out the door.

But in the short-term, the impact is something far more sinister: a slump in what Bourke calls "discretionary effort" - the difference between work-to-rule and the extra effort made by people committed to what they do.

"It's discretionary effort that makes some organisations more profitable than others," says Bourke. But that extra juice will be available only when staff "feel they are well treated, when they feel valued, where they are treated holistically as a person with a life".

But employee work and life balance can be hard for middle managers to negotiate, as they often find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Says Bourke: "They just don't feel they have the luxury of being flexible. [Negotiating flexibility] feels like another burden - they don't see it as enabling, but one more thing to juggle. They want someone to put their nose to the grindstone, because that's what they're doing."

As middle managers are often working to short-term goals, "they don't see the long-term benefit" of flexibility.

Gaps between what's promulgated by company HR and what actually happens will show up in devices such as exit interviews, but surveys, turnover figures and focus group chat can also help companies identify them.

"Discussion of how [managers will manage staff work/life balance] is important," says Bourke, "and often it's not being done."

Or what's being done "is reactive". She cites one division of IBM as a company to emulate: managers discuss their practical responses to company policies on work/life balance, and those "hows" are embedded in individuals' key performance indicators.

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