Chapter 9
Maintaining Your New Working Life
In This Chapter
Showing you can balance work and life
Maintaining your new work arrangement
Improving your work/life balance even more
Keeping your boss under control
Testing the success of your work/life balance
In order to maintain a realistic level of work/life balance, you have to juggle a lot of situations. You need to look after your physical health (refer to Chapter 4), improve your time management and prioritisation skills (refer to Chapter 6), take decent breaks (refer to Chapter 7) and find the flexible working arrangement that best suits you, your family and the organisation you work for (refer to Chapter 8). Having all those challenges on your plate may make you feel like going straight back to bed and staying there. You can’t because you have even more work to do . . .
By work, I mean making sure that your new arrangements don’t become forgotten or ‘eaten into’ by managers and work mates or crushed by unforgiving workloads. On the other hand, you don’t have to be unyielding and rigid when genuinely unforeseen and crucial deadlines come up and you’re able to make the appropriate child-care, after-school care or elderly care arrangements.
This chapter discusses how to improve and gain skills in assertiveness, get access to good advice, help write guidelines for other staff members and develop a determination to sniff out other good employers to find out what they’re doing successfully. Add to these challenges the ability to negotiate with a manager who may not be as supportive as your previous manager and stir in a willingness to review and evaluate how your flexible working option has turned out. Sounds really easy, doesn’t it?
Setting an Example
Guilt has an all-too-frequent way of invading your time at work, whispering into your ear that ‘You can’t leave at 3 pm today because you haven’t finished your working paper for the boss yet’ or ‘You’re letting everyone down because the rest of the team can’t move to the next stage of the project without your report’. And try this one: ‘Come on, you’re the only person who can do this’. And if your own guilt doesn’t keep you at work, ignoring your flexible working arrangement, then well-meaning colleagues or the boss can set up meetings that fall on your non-working day and expect you to shift your week around to accommodate them.
Making rules about your working arrangements and sticking with them is important. For example, make clear to your team that you can be contacted at A and B times, but definitely not at X and Y times. If you’re working from home, you won’t be at your computer after 7 pm, or on weekends. That doesn’t mean you can’t work additional or different hours if the work need is genuine and you can arrange your schedule. But by sticking to your rules most of the time, your team soon knows when to arrange a meeting if they want you there, or when the best time to contact you is. Most email programs have an automatic message and signature system that can include this information for you.
Easy steps to ensure that your guilt or your colleagues’ lack of consideration doesn’t fritter away your flexibility are:
Be active: Participate in committees, working parties or meetings on specific projects and even organisation-wide committees on flexible working and how the changes can benefit other colleagues. You may find that colleagues who appear to misunderstand or resent your arrangement may in fact want to establish one as well. Smile, listen to them and see if you can show them how.
Be organised: Be thorough in delivering file notes, hand-over reports and regular emails about your progress on various tasks and projects. Arrange back-up support for your absences in advance and advise your colleagues of the arrangements and who to contact and for what. By keeping them updated, you reduce misunderstandings and keep them aware of how you work and what you’re doing for the team/business plan.
Be reliable: Stick to your side of the arrangement and complete your tasks when they’re due, or let your manager know as soon as possible if you have a problem. Don’t ever let your boss feel that he or she doesn’t know what’s going on in your work day.
Make yourself accessible: Broadband, the Internet, email, SMS, mobile phones and even the good old telephone exist for you to communicate with your boss (and other people).
Publicise your availability: Communicate. Make sure your colleagues know what you’re doing and when. Make sure they know when you are — and are not — available. And stick to the rules, without sounding rude or unhelpful.
Show flexibility: Fill in for a colleague in an emergency or attend occasional out-of-hours meetings. These helpful tasks go a long way to revealing that you’re still a team player who can be relied on during emergencies.
Keeping Your Hard-Won Working Arrangements
So how do you maintain your flexible working arrangement? The time has come to look at what being assertive is and what it isn’t. Being assertive is an honest expression of your feelings, opinions or needs. That means being able to stand up for your rights and not let another person take advantage of you. Assertive also means being able to say what you want in a clear fashion in a way that shows you have confidence in yourself and your point of view.
Like me, you were probably taught by your family and teachers at school that concentrating on the needs of others and not your own needs is good manners. It’s a nice thought. But that rule makes asking for what you want and need more difficult. Negotiating your terms of work is about you and the organisation that employs you.
Your self-esteem affects assertiveness in two very significant ways. If you have a low opinion about yourself, you can find difficulty mustering up the confidence to speak for yourself. Alternatively, anxiety may make you become aggressive at inappropriate times. You can appear irritable or angry to scare off other people while really you’re the one who feels scared and lacking in confidence.
I once worked with a senior manager who used to regularly announce that she ‘didn’t suffer fools gladly’. Her aggressive behaviour sent the message to the staff members that she considered us all fools. The staff members used to surmise that she was frustrated because she had been overlooked for a more executive role and wanted to take out her frustrations on the people around her. With the benefit of hindsight, I now see that she may have been scared to show her disappointment to us.
Accepting assertiveness
I’m sure you know that you need to be more assertive at times and have even given other people advice on being more assertive. However, when it comes to your own situation, being assertive can be a challenge. People who know how to assert themselves — or stand up for their rights — in a respectful manner are often the most successful in retaining a good work arrangement and the support of their managers. Assertiveness is associated with positive self-esteem.
Being assertive doesn’t mean being aggressive. Assertive behaviour doesn’t involve blaming, threatening or demanding. Aggression includes threats, sarcasm, name-calling and gossip tactics — none of which helps gain the respect of colleagues or the boss and aggression certainly won’t win the battle.
On the other hand, people avoid being assertive because they’re afraid of upsetting others and of not being liked. This urge goes way beyond the school yard. Nevertheless, not asserting yourself can make you feel taken advantage of and reduces your self-esteem even more.
By not asking for a new project or a salary increase, because you generally find it difficult to ask for anything, you not only feel bad about yourself, but you’re showing you’re not in control of your career.
You may even try telling yourself that if your employer valued you, then your boss would notice how good you are at your job, offer you new projects and a raise without you having to ask for it. Sadly, in this working era, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. The consequences of not being assertive could mean that you continue to doubt your abilities and feel even more like a powerless victim of your employer.
Ask yourself the following questions to find out how assertive you really are:
Are you able to say ‘no’ when you don’t want to do something?
Do you ask for help when you need it or question matters when you are confused?
Do you express anger and annoyance appropriately?
Do you offer your opinion when you disagree with others?
Do you look people in the eye when you’re talking to them?
Do you speak up in meetings regularly?
Do you speak with a generally confident manner, communicating a genuine interest in your subject and confidence in your opinion?
Finding mentors
Mentoring can be a very effective support tool for you to ensure that you’re not alone in your efforts to maintain a fulfilling job — and career path — while also staying in contention for future promotions. Mentors have often already been in your situation and can be the best weapon in your fight for better work/life balance. An experienced co-worker knows the employer’s policies and special cases and can provide examples of other employees who set up a good flexible working arrangement.
A mentor enables you to confidentially discuss any work issues of concern and provides you with encouragement, constructive comments, trust and advice. A mentor provides you with contacts that help you in other areas of expertise, such as finding the right Human Resources (HR) professional to help you, or showing you how to move sideways to increase your skill level. Establishing a mentor partnership also provides you with a valuable support in times of job change or organisational restructure.
What is a mentor?
A mentor is usually a more experienced employee, willing to spend time sharing professional and personal skills and experiences with a more junior employee. A mentor–employee workplace partnership is based on encouragement, relevant advice, mutual trust, respect and a willingness from both parties to learn and share.
The benefits for you, the less-experienced employee (or mentee) include
A smoother progression through promotion and management levels
A supportive and confidential forum where your achievements and disappointments can be discussed
Improved understanding of each of your roles within the organisation
Increased self-confidence
Increased skills and knowledge
Increased understanding of the culture and unwritten rules of the organisation
When you approach your potential mentor, you can explain that studies have shown that having mentors has helped employees benefit from
Challenging discussions from mentees with different perspectives (and knowledge of other aspects of the organisation) who aren’t already part of the management
Enhanced knowledge of other areas of the organisation
Opportunities to reflect upon the mentor’s career and current role
Renewed enthusiasm for the mentor’s role as an experienced employee
Satisfaction for the mentor for contributing to your development
As for your organisation, encouraging skilled and senior staff to mentor others can result in opportunities for improved communication between different teams, managers with improved people management skills and reduced recruitment and selection costs.
Dealing with a Dreadful Boss
As you know, a good boss is someone who can effectively run a company or team and is able to communicate with, and understand, their employees. If your boss consults you on business decisions, shows appreciation for your hard work and responds with rewards, you most enjoy working for them. Unfortunately, you’re not always going to be lucky enough to have the perfect boss. Although you may be able to find ways to work around — or in spite of — them, bad bosses have a huge impact on your working life and, in turn, your work/life balance.
Many national and international workers compensation jurisdictions have found that a difficult working relationship between employer and employee can have a negative impact on your work performance and lead to physical and mental stress. This situation damages or hinders the effectiveness of any flexible working arrangements you may have made with that boss or an earlier boss.
Examples of difficult behaviour shown by some bosses include lack of communication, reluctance to consider any ideas or opinions of their staff, verbal bullying, outmoded thinking and rudeness. All is not lost however. You can improve your working relationship with your boss.
What not to do with a bad boss
Behaving as badly as you believe your boss behaves may be tempting but it’s not professional or helpful to your career. Behaviours to watch, when managing a difficult boss, include
Avoiding interaction as much as possible. Trying to not see your manager in the office kitchen, remaining silent in meetings and communicating only via email is not going to improve the relationship.
Increasing the number of sickies (absenteeism). Employers see frequent sickies as weakness and lack of interest by you, rather than as the outcome of the management style. You may miss out on projects or promotions.
Leaving the position or organisation. Resigning can be the easiest way out of some unpleasant work situations. However, as I’ve discovered, resigning can merely serve to clear the way for someone else to end up in the same miserable situation that you escaped.
Mirroring the manager’s behaviour. This may include rudeness, verbal insults or back-stabbing behaviour. You can end up like two children endlessly yelling and arguing with no resolution, only increasing anger and worsening behaviour.
Remaining silent and meekly obeying. The manager may like your timidity but you can find yourself seething, dreading coming in to work or becoming depressed.
How to meet on common ground
If you and your manager disagree on issues relating to your access to work/life flexibility policies, the workload involved, types of work you’re required to do or even how to run the workplace, various methods can be introduced to encourage communication between you, including
Aiming to solve the disagreement: You don’t have to win every single argument you have with your boss. Instead, you can ask for your boss’s opinions on an issue. Really listen, take notes, ask open-ended questions and find the positive comments.
Being calm and reasonable: Your boss doesn’t have to feel the same way about an issue as you do and isn’t going to continue discussing an issue with you if you lose your cool.
Complimenting them: Yes, you can compliment your boss on any suggestions that you think are workable. You can always find some common ground — no matter how minor — that you already agree on, so tell the boss when you agree with a comment.
Recommending instead of demanding: Suggest your ideas rather than insist on your way or no way. Explain how your ideas can benefit the organisation.
Researching: Your boss may be more interested if you can show that you have thoroughly researched your ideas and can present them professionally, discussing both the possible benefits and the drawbacks.
Establishing Excellent Work/Life Balance Policies
A very effective way to ensure that your own flexible working arrangement continues is to help your HR department or manager write a policy on work/life balance. You may be surprised at how enthusiastically your offer of help is accepted. A lot of workplaces like the idea of introducing work/life balance policies but don’t know where to start.
Most effective work/life policies currently in place in Australia and around the world contain at least some advantages to employees. Through discussions with your in-house experts (HR officers, your boss, other managers and key staff members) and by searching out what other employers are doing, you can offer recommendations you think best match your workplace.
Allowance for the following work/life situations is very common in Australian:
Carer support
Flexible working options
Leave options
Personal work/life balance
Flexible working options
Everyone wants flexible working options available if and when needed. Employees also want their bosses to have guidelines to help consider employee requests fairly and promptly. I’ve done some of the hard work and sought out options that are tried and tested by many employers and have been shown to work. Some options that may suit your workplace include
Compressed work week: Working a full-time week in four days.
Flexi-time: Starting and finishing at variable times.
Job sharing: Two people split one job.
Part-time working: Working less than standard full-time hours.
Telecommuting: Working from home on a regular or as-needs basis.
Term-time working: Working only during school terms.
For more information on these options, refer to Chapter 8.
Personal work/life balance
Development plans let managers and companies review work/life balance policies on a regular basis. Planning ahead for the busiest working times or recruitment drives or accommodating the changing needs of staff (for example, people moving from full-time to part-time work) can be done using
An open-door approach to problems, as well as groups for managers to establish good rapport with their staff to ensure that business and personal needs are met
Individual development plans and regular appraisals
Mentoring by experienced colleagues or by external trainers
In addition to standard amounts of annual leave, sick leave and maternity leave, employers are increasingly adopting more flexible leave options to attract and retain their valued staff and listing them in their work/life balance policies. These new options can include
Additional purchased holiday leave: This leave is commonly known as 48/52 where an employee gains four weeks of extra leave and spreads the salary impact of this leave without pay over each salary period for the year.
Career breaks or sabbaticals: This option is offered to staff working out of Australia for long periods. Employers in many countries are also recognising the value of giving their staff longer breaks from work, especially for employees approaching retirement age, or for travel and study needs. Employers can see that providing leave without pay enables people to take a longer break and return refreshed instead of burning out and leaving altogether. (See Chapter 13 for more on this topic.)
Paid paternity leave: New fathers need time from work to adjust to the demands of a new baby. This can be anything from a week to six months, depending on the employer, industry, country and whether the father is offered leave that’s paid, part-paid or unpaid.
Study leave: For many years, employers readily offered study leave (especially during exam times) to staff studying in a field that directly benefited their work. However, nowadays, more employers offer study leave opportunities to staff members studying in unrelated areas as a means of rewarding the employees for their work, their loyalty and their need to have greater work/life balance. (See Chapter 12 for more on this topic.)
Carer support
As mothers and workers nearing retirement age are encouraged to stay in the labour market, employers can help with their family care responsibilities, especially when some workers provide care to elderly parents or relatives, as well as for their children. Employers can help employees with caring responsibilities in the following ways:
Child-care providers: Provide information on where child-care centres, family day care and other child-care providers are located close to the workplace or en route to work from the employee’s home.
Partnerships with local child-care centres: Larger employers sometimes partner with child-care centres to offer subsidised child care or preferential places to employees.
Salary sacrifice: Some employers make this offer to help the worker buy equipment, such as medical equipment when the employee has a child or elderly parent with disabilities.
Asking the experts
Most employers in reasonably large organisations have a Human Resources (HR) expert (or department). These professionals are there to help employees. Most Australian employers with more than 100 employees have some guidelines — however vague or outdated — that cover the types of leave available to workers. In addition, HR professionals actively seek more information and training on work/life balance issues and are open to reviewing and re-drafting policies.
So how do employers get their workers to take an interest in the new work/life balance policies you may have helped HR produce? Here are some ways:
Create opportunities for open discussion: You can establish a specific Intranet discussion group on the work/life balance policy and call for suggestions, problem solving and the gathering of case studies from other employers. Invite the contributors to add comments anonymously. Most office network packages have this option.
Include the policies in training: Make sure your workplace work/life balance policy is a mandatory part of in-house management and training courses and is included in induction courses for new staff.
Make the policies available: Add copies of the new workplace policies to recruitment materials, new staff manuals and the HR section of the staff online information portal.
Provide rewards: Staff and managers who work together to achieve a happier workplace through appropriately adopting the new policies can be rewarded via a salary increase, a staff lunch paid for by the company, a ‘bring your spouse/child/dog to work day’ chosen by the staff member, gift vouchers and time off to attend a course or conference. The ideas are endless.
Publicise success stories: In workplaces with more than 50 employees, word-of-mouth stories about how Peter’s compressed hours led to improved customer service, or why Melinda is working at 7 am, are likely to miss a few people who may be genuinely interested. Publicising the policies and details of the staff members who are benefiting from the policies can be easily done via a weekly staff email or a staff-only Intranet site.
Measuring Success
Calm down, this section is not about the new expectation that you’re now going to take over the entire Human Resources department when your position is in a completely unrelated field. However, becoming familiar with the ways in which your manager and/or HR professional can monitor staff levels in order to determine how successful their work/life balance policies have been can be very useful to you.
Noticeable improvements in staff retention, reduction in recruitment and training costs or outputs can help you — and other work/life balance champions and HR professionals — emphasise the importance of work/life balance policies to senior management. You may even be asked to help run a working group or committee to review the results and work out ways to improve your organisation’s uptake of flexible working options, publicise the policy or think of ways to improve it.
One of the simplest ways to help draft up a work/life balance policy is to ask the staff. Staff surveys are readily available in easy-to-adapt templates on the Internet and can provide some good insights into what employees need to stay with the organisation and remain productive.
An established method of determining if your workplace is making improvements in retaining good staff and reducing staff turnover is to monitor the numbers. Most workplaces have computerised HR-management systems that are able to track employees by age, gender, position within the organisation, full- or part-time status and rates of sick leave taken — among other things.
Here are some questions that can be asked of staff statistics to help you determine work/life balance policies:
Do women who take maternity leave return afterwards? If not, why not? If yes, how many work full time and how many work part time?
How do overall staff turnover, maternity leave, sick leave and workers compensation claims compare with other employers in your industry?
What are the key causes of absence from work?
What are the key causes of workplace injury (physical and psychological)? What areas of the organisation are creating the most claims? How do the numbers of claims compare with the past few years?
What are the rates of absenteeism this year compared to the previous year?
What are the reasons for turnover? Does the organisation conduct exit interviews or provide exit surveys?
What is the level of staff turnover? What was it like twelve months earlier? What was it like two years earlier?
