MEETING WITH a frantic, harassed mother at the end of the working day is not something I'd forget in a hurry. One evening as I collected my children from a creche, I saw a woman arrive a bit late to collect her three-year-old.
She was close to tears, her car parked on double-yellow lines and trying to fend off complaints from the creche staff that this was her third day being late.
For no apparent reason she started explaining to me that she was expected to work until 7.30pm on Tuesdays. By chance I happened to know her boss and his business. He is the sort of driven guy for whom terms such as "Type-A", "mercurial" and "very focused" would all be appropriate.
He was paying this woman to sell over the phone and Tuesday was a key revenue day for advance weekend sales, with everyone on the sales team working late.
I offered to take her child home with my two on any evening when she had to work late. She thought, at first, that I was joking and then beamed with delight.
We got to know each other fairly well as she came to collect her toddler at about 7.45pm a few evenings a week. She was much more relaxed and I assumed it was because her boss was not giving her grief over leaving early.
Her predicament came to mind as I prepared for today. So what is today? Well, it's Friday, the end of the working week for many. It is also the annual Work-Life Balance Day, something that causes great confusion in many workplaces. That is why I thought back to this mother and her employer.
In Ireland the focus on work-life balance is mainly a "social partnership" invention where what used be called "both sides of industry"found some common ground over the issue in the late 1990s.
The difficult part is the balance element with the work-life balance slogan sometimes seen as short-hand for "dossing" or as just a modern version of "part-time working".
From an employer perspective, "work-life balance" is usually an additional cost, involves increased administrative burdens and often comes under the general rubric of "all that other good stuff". Really it is an issue of flexibility and has to been seen in that light if it is to contribute to workplace efficiency.
The peak of enthusiasm came at the beginning of this decade with the very tight labour market and moves to entice more women and mothers into the active labour force. This was before the plentiful supply of migrant workers, especially since 2004.
Attracting "Irish mothers" to fill jobs had a lot of appeal. They were often already well-trained and had up to a decade of work experience. There were no problems of finding accommodation and work-permits or overcoming language barriers.
By 2000, we were hearing grandiose political promises of workplace creches, which were later diverted into debates over the impact of childcare centres in industrial estates.
Since then work-life balance has taken a step backwards and it is now part of the "social partnership" glue. Campaigns such as today's are funded by the exchequer through bodies such as the Equality Authority and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment under the umbrella of a social partnership National Framework Committee backed, but not funded, by Ibec and Ictu.
The Equality Authority took two initiatives, with mixed results. Boosted by EU finding, it appointed a panel of advisers to promote and facilitate work-life balance initiatives.
However, the take-up has been very low over the past five years. This has been partly because the focus is too tight rather than being aimed at overall organisational effectiveness and flexibility.
The second initiative saw about 15 organisations receive incentives of about €20,000 each to look at potential work-life balance initiatives. This has been more successful, if leaning heavily towards the public sector.
In the health sector the whole gambit of work-life balance takes in issues such as term-time working; job-sharing; annualised hours; four shifts over eight days; care or study leave and career breaks of up to five years. With such a range of issues there is a danger work-life balance will become just another bargaining chip in the demand by 50,000 nurses for the 35-hour week currently enjoyed by most therapists.
A very useful outcome of the funded projects was findings such as the impact of senior management attitudes, focus on childcare and internal communications. It is notoriously difficult to measure effective gains from work-life balance initiatives, apart from reduced staff turnover and improved morale. But on the morale side there is a growing problem of those without immediate family-care duties feeling they are having to carry a work burden for those who leave meetings early to make the evening "race to the creche".
It is clear that work-life balance is part of organisational flexibility and it has to be linked to effective internal communication and performance measurements to be acceptable to most, if not all, employees. Often the senior management have much more personal control over their working hours, even if they put in a 45-hour week, and this inhibits their ability to empathise with the lower-paid "nine-to-fivers" who cannot afford the nanny or the personal child-minder.
The unspoken aspect is that sometimes work-life balance is not possible and one element has to be sacrificed, but with high mortgage repayments, in dual-income households that is a very tough decision. Any man lucky enough to receive a leap year marriage proposal today might well dwell on that.
Gerald Flynn is an employment specialist with Align Management Solutions in Dublin.
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