Work-life balance

I’ve reflected quite a bit on so-called “work-life balance” throughout my working life. Anyone who gets into key positions, especially in management or in expert roles, will face the “work-life” struggle. Work has the potential to stray outside the normal 9am to 5:30pm hours, sometimes by a long way and over a long period of time.

I’m certainly no stranger to the tension – I’ve been in roles earlier on in my career where I worked more than 60 hours a week, some days starting at 5:30am and working through until 2-3am the next morning on occasions. After my first redundancy, however, I became fairly cynical. Hard work, even the sacrifice of my own time outside the hours contracted, did not seem to produce any loyalty from The Company or increase job security. With four young children and a wife looking after them at home, I was also under pressure to give more quality time to them. So I started to rebel, in a non-dogmatic kind of way. I consciously tried to limit my working hours. But there are problems with that approach, and I have struggled, along with 50% of the working population if statistics are to be believed, with getting the right balance between putting priority on urgent work to be done and focusing on family and personal priorities.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the subject:

1. The term “work-life balance” itself is probably flawed and arises from the tension between two misconceived presuppositions. Do we live to work or work to live? Or neither?

The term “work-life balance” suggests that I have work on one side of the scales and life on the other, and the ideal would be to have them in a happy equilibrium. In other words it makes a distinction between work and life. My contention is that it is wrong to make such a sharp distinction. For me work is part of my life, but it is not the whole of my life.

The overwhelming pressure that we have found since the 1970s/80s to work harder and harder can be summed up in the phrase “I live to work”. Work is one of this generation’s great idols. Our work is what gives us meaning and purpose. It is what we do that defines our contribution to the progress of the human race. Therefore I should work as hard as I can, making sacrifices to achieve as much as possible.

We idolize entrepreneurs, sports stars and people who are at the top of their fields – people who have reached those positions by enormous effort, tenacity and sacrifice. To them the idea of balance is ridiculous. Success in their field is everything, and we admire them for achieving it and overlook the battered remains of families, marriages and friendships left behind in their wake.

On the other hand the classic “work-life balance” stance is the opposite – “I work to live”! Why should I let work consume every part of my life to the extent that I have no time and energy left to enjoy it? The purpose of life is to enjoy life. Therefore, work is a means to earn money to buy holidays and other leisure activities, including spending time with the family if I am the less selfish sort (and less and less of us are that sort, judging from the birth rate, marriage rate and divorce rate… but that’s another subject!). Just witness the explosion in the availability of leisure activities and the importance we place on music, movies, sport, entertainment, relaxation, experiences.

But we ought to realize that both those positions are presuppositions from different forms of secular humanistic worldviews. “I live to work” assumes that my purpose is to help the human race to make progress. So I should strive to have the job that helps me to do that best, using my natural gifts and abilities. “I work to live” assumes that my purpose is to enjoy the world around me because there is nothing else – “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” – the classic hedonist catchphrase.

The phrase “work-life balance” is really a reaction against the “I live to work” mentality, assuming that work is taking up so much time and energy that I don’t have enough left to live life.

So my conclusion was that the reason the term “work-life balance” does not work for me is because it clashes with my Christian worldview. The Christian worldview would say that I neither work to live or live to work. God created human beings to glorify Him, telling them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over [creation].” We are called to be workers therefore, yes, but also parents, teachers, worshippers, members of the community – all in order to bring glory to Him.

The entrance of sin into the world has distorted our view of those objectives, blinded us completely in some cases, so that even my last paragraph will cause laughter for some, anger for others and complete mystery for others.

There is a lot more that could be said about Jesus Christ and his solution to the problem of sin – the Christian gospel. However, my point here is simply that our view of work and balance is based on our fundamental presuppositions about existence/life, knowledge and morality.

For me, from a Christian standpoint, everything in my life has to be done to God’s glory. That means work has an important part in my life, because God has made human beings workers. Family is important in my life, because God has given me an important role in raising a family. Community is important in my life because God said “love your neighbour as yourself”. Leisure is also an important part of life, because one of the ways we glorify God is by enjoying His creation (in a responsible way).

2. Work-life balance is sometimes portrayed as the domain of the family man or working mother.


One of my previous employers made real efforts to encourage work-life balance. And of course we have seen the UK government and EU try to legislate for it as well – parental leave to augment maternity leave, but applying both to fathers and mothers; the Working Time Directive; etc. But I well remember the mild bitterness of one female employee, a darn-good Financial Reporting Manager at the time, recently married with no kids yet. She said that really all the encouragement for work-life balance was so that people could spend more time with their families. But for someone like her, with no pressing need to get back home in the evening for kids bathtime or bedtime story, and her husband equally stretched and working long hours, she could never get a good enough excuse to limit her hours.

What she felt was that those with families were treated with sympathy if they wanted to limit their hours. But those with no kids were still expected to pick up the slack and do the long hours on their behalf! It didn’t seem fair. And to be honest, I can see that kind of discrimination being a reality.

(The Working Time Directive, I guess, was supposed to address that issue by limiting working hours for everybody, but in practice had no discernable impact on anything as far as I can see. What a waste of time! And people actually opt out from it too! Whenever you sign a new employment contract you are given a Working Time Directive opt out clause to sign. This means you waive your right to limit your working hours to 48 hours per week on average over 17 weeks. Employers are not allowed to discriminate against employees that do not opt out, and they are not allowed to compel employees to opt out. So why do employees sign this waiver of rights?! I have never signed the opt out… and at times continued to work more than 48 hours a week over a 17 week period! There have been no consequences on anybody one way or the other!)

Following on from my last point, this is a concern. From my point of view, every aspect of life has a place, and the childless person or single person must still be allowed to engage their outside-of-work interests without guilt, just as much as the parent must be allowed to fulfill their responsibilities as a parent. There should be no discrimination in favour of parents.

3. Where does the pressure to work long hours come from?

This is actually quite a big question. And there may be a different perceived cause in different situations. And there may be a cultural root cause (or causes) beneath those.

Do people work long hours because they want to? Sometimes the “I live to work” mentality comes through strongly. I have met people who so love their jobs that they spend every available hour on it. I don’t belittle them for it. It’s great to love your work. But often they are the big bosses, and they presume everyone else is the same!

Do people work long hours because they are forced to by their employers? This is really a rather simplistic way of putting it. If it means, do people get threatened with being fired if they don’t work as many hours as they are asked to, even if it is more than stated in their employment contract, then this is probably fairly rare. Similarly if it means do people sign employment contracts with specified long hours in them, because they wouldn’t be employed otherwise, then again probably fairly rare.

Perhaps emotional blackmail is more common than actual coercion. “C’mon, we’ll never fulfill this contract order on time if we don’t all put in some extra hours… yes, I know I said that last time and the time before…” And what this overlooks, of course, is that the employer has the power to employ more people to do the work and take the pressure off you. Why don’t they? Because they probably quoted the contract (in the example) assuming they could squeeze some extra hours out, or simply underestimated the work. And so, having won the contract, or priced the product, etc, they would start to lose money if they employed too many more people.

Similarly, perhaps fears over job security “force” people to work longer hours. They want to be seen to be the keenest, the people with the highest output. Then when the accountant’s red pen comes out (in my experience this is a gross caricature, so I’m not sure why I’m using it, being an accountant myself!) we will be lower down the redundancy list.

It would be too easy, I believe, to immediately point the finger of blame at the balance of power shifting towards corporations and away from employees, especially following the decline of trade unions and so on. Where do the pressures on us originate? When the big bosses set the department budgets, asking for year on year cost reductions while asking for greater output, they do it to try and achieve bottom-line growth. And why is bottom-line growth important? For public companies growth in profits allows growth in dividends, and growth and stability help to increase the share price, at least compared to competitors.

Why is share price important? Because companies want people to invest in them. If people don’t invest in them, then they have to borrow and pay interest. Investors prefer stable, growing, profitable, cash-generative companies. The riskier the business (i.e. more volatile or less tried-and-tested) the more return investors want for putting money in.

So it’s the investors who create the pressure. But who are the investors in your employer? For many it’s the government (NHS, civil service, education, etc), and therefore the ultimate stakeholder is the tax-payer – YOU! For the majority of other employees, working in public companies, it’s pension schemes, endowment funds, ISAs, etc. And who demands higher returns from pension schemes, etc? YOU!

So it turns out that when we demand better returns from our savings, pensions and investments, and when we demand greater efficiency from our public services – we are building more pressure on ourselves (as a group) to work harder!! Our own greed is driving our plight!

But again, that’s far too simplistic in one respect. The pressure from stakeholders to deliver returns or to be more efficient has always existed. What held back the long-hours culture in the past was a more balanced view of work. The working time available from the workforce was seen as a limiting factor. If someone was contracted for 40 hours a week, then they would only be asked to work 40 hours a week, and would be compensated for overtime. Nowadays it is common to see no reference to working hours specified in employment contracts (especially for management or clerical jobs), simply a clause to the effect that “I will work as many hours as it takes to get the job done”. So in the past we respected people’s time as their own, and therefore agreed to pay a reasonable salary for a slice of it. Nowadays we set the salary and say we’ll have as much time as we want in return!

In the past, the weekend was not for working. Shops closed, banks closed, not just for Sunday, but for part of Saturday as well. Nowadays 24/7/365 is almost the aim. There is now no one time of the week when communities and families can spend time together. We mocked keeping Sunday special, because of it’s Christian basis, but now feel the exhaustion and stress coming from a world of work without adequate rest.

We have given up on some of our moral principles, and have reaped the harvest of wealth, but not without human cost. My conviction is that workplace stress and long hours culture is not the result of a political or social policy (many people seem to blame capitalism and “The Thatcher legacy”). I believe it is the result of a moral and spiritual decline. It’s the result of changing views about what life is all about and the way it should be lived.

4. Conclusion

Work-life balance issues are simply more consequences of a shift in worldviews. There are no easy answers. My practical advice is to think carefully about how work fits into your life overall, and don’t assume that it has the same place for everyone. If you are a manager, respect each employee individually, recognizing quality rather than quantity of work; and see their value as holistic human beings (with families, communities and life-enriching hobbies), not just workers.