SAFETY SATURDAY: WORK-LIFE BALANCE

 “I leave my brain at [the] gate when I arrive, and pick it up at [the] end of [the] shift...” 

 - (Parker, 2014) 

Contemporary work is an all-encompassing thing. The work week is made up five working days and two resting days. A working day is made up of eight hours of scheduled work, and a person’s life and recuperation generally fit in the gaps on either side of their start and finish time, Workers need to commute to and from work - the average Australian spends 169 hours commuting to and from work in a calendar year (Real Insurance, 2022). The average Australian needs to shop to feed themselves, needs to purchase clothes, needs to ensure their comfort, and needs to spend money on their health and wellbeing which is often impacted by their work (Wolford, 1964; Rosenthal et. al., 2012). Work imposes obligations of engagement, time-reservation, and of effort. Going to work and doing work exacts a physical, mental, and emotional toll on the worker, from which the worker must recover. The time in which this recovery is increasingly short, with 44% of workers spending non-work time doing some form of labour related to their work (Australia Institute, 2022), and 34% of Australians of all ages reporting that they feel some kind of time stress in their lives (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022). Work is a dominating force in the lives of those who do it - it affects their health, their decisionmaking, their sociocultural milieu, and their wellbeing in the short and the long term. 

Throughout the time in which people work, managing the balance between work and life is a continuous and ubiquitous challenge. Work exacts physical stress that is felt as soreness when away from a worksite, and which stops a person from sitting or lying comfortably at home. Work exacts cognitive strain that may exhaust someone so totally that they can’t unwind by reading a book, listening to music, or even just being alone with thoughts that stray back to a person’s employment. Work exacts emotional strain that, when compounded, can cause physical health effects that compound with adverse secondary health outcomes like heart disease, diabetes, and sleep disturbances as well as muscular symptoms like tension, pain, and headaches (Ritvanen et. al., 2003; Niedhammer et. al., 2021; Abdul Rahim et. al., 2022). Failure to adequately manage work-life boundaries leads to infiltration of work into peoples’ personal lives, causing psychological and emotional tension (Ezzedeen & Zikic, 2017). The transformation of work, owing to technology, distribution of work, decreased formalisation of working arrangements and the increased uncertainty of the labour market means that work and work-related sequelae are penetrating more and more into peoples’ lives. In academic investigation, both work and family life are regarded as incompatible, and that is the presupposition that will be used throughout this discussion, firstly owing to the identified necessity of achieving balance between working life and personal life as a key component of individual and societal wellbeing (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2013), secondly owing to established scholarship that identifies clear delineations between work time and personal time as being antecedent to achieving worklife balance (Kossek et. al 2006; 2012) and lastly to the author’s personal and firmly held bias that work should be left at work because that is where it belongs and it should not subtract from the doing, dignity, or depth of life.

To discuss the notion of a work-life boundary is to implicitly discuss the notion of a work-life balance. Colloquially, a person’s work-life balance refers broadly to the necessity of managing competing priorities in a person’s psychoemotional milieu - such things including family, work friends, the self, recreation, advancement, and endeavour (Byrne, 2005). To balance the competing priorities of work and life is to recognise that both work and life compete for the same finite resources of attention, energy, and engagement (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004), all of which are finite resources. The search for work-life balance is the process in which workers find a relationship with their work that is a sustainable equilibrium in comparison with the worker’s capacity and priorities, and these change with time. The challenge in managing work life balance is that both life and work are dynamic elements in this equation (Dhas & Karthikeyan, 2015). The demands of life change over the span of life and with commitments like family, education, health, wellbeing, and personal pursuits. Work demands may change as a consequence of work intensification and extensification (Mumenthaler et. al., 2021). Work and life are two codeveloped and co-engaged practices that are carried out and exist along time. A worker defines and utilises boundaries between work and life in order to facilitate the balance between those two arenas. Boundaries are defined individually and collectively, and may be firmly applied, permeable, and boundaries may be different between two workers (Matthews & Barnes-Farrell, 2010). Some workers may tolerate being contactable outside of their office hours, and others will strictly segregate their work and personal communications by using separate email accounts or devices, for example (Leduc, Houlfort & Bordeau, 2016). These are examples of boundary management techniques that are developed at the worker level. Equally, work-life boundary management may be undertaken at the work design level to ensure that work does not inadvertently spill over into nonwork segregated time (Nam, 2014). At this point, it is worth noting that the work-life boundary may be crossed from either side (Ransome, 2007). Work may intrude on a worker’s personal life, such as when they need to take work home with them, or a worker’s personal life may intrude into their working hours and cause a performance decrement, such as when a worker may have a sick family member, financial stress, or some other factor that impedes their performance. This is important to remember where the concerns of life may spill over into work-related cognitive spheres, and may impact on work demands which are inflexible. 

The point of articulation between the demands of work and home creates conflict at the boundary between work and nonwork. In academic literature, this is explored using the notions of work-family conflict and family-work conflict, as both work and family may compete with each other for capitalisation of the finite resources of the worker (Greenhaus & Beutel, 1985). However, it may be more appropriate to characterise the balance axis in terms of life, as workers may not have families, and the word life more accurately encapsulates the lived, psychological and spiritual experience of a worker when they are not at work while still including family within the subset of those priorities. It is also worth noting at this point that the academic examination of the dynamics of work-life conflict are too broad, deep, and nuanced to be accurately summarised or otherwise receive appropriate treatment in the span of a blog whose readership will likely number in the single digits. Where possible, workers will attempt to separate their lives from their work, using cognitive, spatial, relational, and emotional barriers (Nippert-Eng, 2008). These barriers exist to buffer the worker from the impact of organisational factors such as high job demands, time-pressure at work, poor autonomy, poor role clarity, and lack of personal resources which are drains on a worker’s ability to engage with the demands of work without utilising nonwork assets (Sirgy & Lee, 2018). When considered in this manner, the performance outcomes arising from the balance between work and life may be interpreted within the Job Demands and Resources model proposed by Bakker & Demerouti (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007) as being informed by the balance between organisational and worker resources meeting work demands. However, it is notable that whenever a worker needs to leverage their own individual resources to meet the demands of work, conflict and performance decrements follow (Bakker et. al., 2004). Ideally, a worker will never be in a situation where they need to use resources that are not allocated to their work as a function of time, engagement, work intensification or extensification in order to do their jobs. 

The ecosystem of work and nonwork factors that may give rise to work-life conflict are infinite, as each worker, workplace, circumstance, and meeting between the three are different, as well as being beyond the scope of this post. However, the integrative framework proposed by Sirgy & Lee in 2018 suggests that work-life balance may be supported by role engagement in work and nonwork life, as well as minimal conflict between work and nonwork roles - a worker must be engaged in nonwork life to their satisfaction. This means, necessarily, that the capital draws imposed on a worker by their workplace and work tasks must not so severely deplete their resources that they are unable to address the needs of their life beyond work (Voydanoff, 2005), and that the resources used to meet a worker’s demands in one arena of life may not be used to meet the demands of their work owing to the incompatibility of those two domains (Fisher et. al., 2009). Work-life balance can thus be conceptualised as the controlled limitation of work demands so as to minimise their draw on worker resources (Sirgy & Lee, 2018). Worker resources both in and out of the workplace can be best protected by considering the design and control of work tasks so as to minimise the likelihood of unbuffered escalation or extensification of demands and thus protect the worker from marked changes in their experienced demands (Safe Work Australia, 2015). These can be measures such as the provision of and access to flexible work arrangements, the ability to segment worker time, the access to and allocation of work related information and communication technologies, as well as simple time management strategies (Mellner et. al., 2014). That being said, given the diversity of work tasks, occupations, and consequent nuance of job designs possible within a diverse labour market and the variation of breadth and intensity of job tasks within those roles, appropriate consideration of worker role demands as well as the ability of the worker to meet those demands as a consequence of their life situation and nonwork demands should be a priority when designing work tasks or allocating workers and resources within an organisation. 

Work is one of the great inevitabilities and the great arenas of life. People may engage in paid employment from the time they are sixteen and need not stop until they are either too old to complete their duties of work or until they voluntarily retire. Time is spent at work in exchange for monetary, social, and personal enrichment, and the basis of that exchange should not be so poorly defined as to spill over into workers’ lives. Work takes up more than sixty hours of the week. Work takes up finite time that might be spent at leisure, with family, at rest, or at recreational endeavour. Managing the boundary between life and work is essential to ensure that while work-related sequelae are prevented from impinging on the sanctity of individual time, that work and the workplace itself may serve as remedial resources and a point of protection for workers who are experiencing stress, strain, or strife in their own lives. To work is to exchange time for money, for enrichment, for advancement. Isn’t it possible to review the moral basis of that exchange and use work as a means to fortify the person, by drawing barriers between life and work, what is important and what must be done, and using the one to support the other?

None of this information constitutes medical, legal, occupational health and safety, best guidance, standard, or other guidance, instruction, or prescription. 

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