I hate the phrase ‘work life balance’.

I actually banned leadership saying it at a previous employer, but more on that below. Everyone’s work life balance requirements are different. If we’re to get philosophical, the balance is always changing as the world around doesn’t stay constant, our desires don’t stay constant and the requirements thrust upon us, whether they be work or life, do not stay constant.

As a preface to make sure we’re consistent on terminology, I want to define some things. These are my definitions, but they allow me to make more sense of what I’m referring to.

Part-time working is where you choose or agree with your employer to work less than the conventional hours (which, for many of us, are usually five days a week).

Flexible working is where the employer and employee agree on the hours to work but agree flexibility over when or where those hours are performed.  So part time working can be done flexibly but it is not automatically flexible (i.e. if your part time work pattern was to work standard office hours in the office from Tuesday to Thursday each week you would be working part time but you would not be working flexibly).

Just defining these throws up the major issue in this area. We still measure and focus on face time and presence in the overwhelming majority of businesses. We value how much time people spend working on work rather than the absolute amount of work/output produced. This, in effect, punishes our most efficient performers.

How many times have you seen employee A get their work done in half the time and try and claim some of that “life” back while employee B has late nights and is seen in office but in the end hasn’t actually created any more value for the organisation. Yet when we come to end of year promotions it is typically employee B who gets the promotions, pay rises and bonuses.

Up and down the country I have seen this again and again – we value and reward inefficiency. I can’t help but think this is related to the significant productivity problem we have in the UK. When was the last time you saw an employment contract that didn’t specify working hours, often in draconian terms? This isn’t all the fault of the employer though, I remember once working for an employer that listed 10am-4pm as its core working hours, in effect attempting to balance the legal requirements of a contract but also give people flexibility. Predictably, the employees themselves were then annoyed when meetings were arranged outside of these hours, completely missing the spirit of what this company was trying to achieve.

So, in this context of a employee-employer relationship that focuses on time rather than output, it’s no wonder that this breaks down to an ‘old school’ economics model of the employer loading the employee up with as much work as possible and then trying to draw every drop of blood from the proverbial stone. The effect this has on work life balance is easy to predict.

So now we’ve set the background to this let’s look at the cultural elements to it.

We live in a society where the line between work and life is increasing blurred and I’ve seen many cases where the boundary doesn’t exist. There are many people whose closest friends are those they meet in work or tangentially through work. This is particularly prevalent when people move away from support networks to another city or another country and work becomes the only solid foundation they have. Have you ever socialised with work colleagues and not talked about work at least in some part?

Next the boundaries of physical location have completely been broken. Smart phones and emails mean that you are effectively contactable and “on” 24/7. With the globalisation of jobs and organisations this means emails and progress coming in overnight and recent studies show that the first thing people do in the morning is not say “morning” to their partner, not have a shower but check their phone. I would venture that a large proportion of these are checking work emails/communication.

As mentioned at the outset, I had to ban the work life balance phrase at a previous company. We realised we had issues with the balance our employees were achieving, we did as we should and announced grandly to the employees that one of our KPIs was to improve their wellbeing. However, we realised that the cyclical nature of the business around quarters often involved late nights and very intense working deadlines and there wasn’t much getting around this. While we scrambled for solutions, employees got fed up of us saying we would figure it out. I even had multiple people come up to me and say that they understood the nature of the business and it was actually our attempts at fixing and our communications around that they found more stressful.

There is a fight back against some of these issues on an individual company basis. Daimler has implemented a radical ‘Mail on Holiday’ policy, where if you send an email to a Daimler employee who is on annual leave it is auto-deleted. The mechanics of this are slightly less drastic than they sound, you get options as the sender to send later or to another employee etc.

However, this clearly draws a psychological contract between the sender (whether it be colleague or external contact) that annual leave is precious, that the tasks of the employee cannot continue to build while they have their time off, in effect not asking them to make up their holiday time when they come back. For me and many others this would reduce the dread of coming back to a full mailbox which sometimes leads to eventually asking yourself whether the holiday was worth it.

There have been a variety of 4 day week experiments across the corporate world. Most of them demonstrating that the benefits far outweigh the costs, if there area actually costs. I’d like to draw upon the largest of them, that I’m aware of.

Microsoft Japan announced a plan to run what it called ‘Work Life Choice’ with an aim to give staff a chance to “work in a short time, take a rest, and learn well.” They would trial a four-day week during which the office would close on Fridays over the summer. The trial had rules: meetings were to be a maximum of 30 minutes, have no more than 5 people in any meeting, and use Microsoft Teams as the preferred method for collaboration. At the end of the trial results were announced and they included a 39.9 per cent uplift in productivity.

I don’t think I could name a business that wouldn’t want a near 40% increase in productivity. However, the amazing thing when you genuinely think about that is that implementing the 4 day week actually allowed them to produce almost 12% more than they did in a 5 day week. This increase in absolute output has been repeated with other companies across the world, but for those of you cynically looking at these figures it’s fair to say that the sample isn’t yet large enough to be conclusive.

At my previous company, I transitioned our phrasing from work life balance to work life co-operation. For me, this reflects the societal, technological and pragmatic nature of employment in the 21^st century. Our work must flex to the things we need to handle in our lives. If we’re sitting at our desk worrying whether we’ll make that pick up time for our children or struggling with a constant toothache because we can’t get an out of hours dentist appointment, our productivity drops anyway.

When work was quieter people were encouraged to leave early and do something else with their time not sit at their desks idling.  For that to work our lives must also flex to our work, which is a much harder sell, we should be willing to ignore the normal time based boundaries to work in the evenings or weekends.

As we’ve seen from the 4 day week statistics, this isn’t a necessity but it should be an option. There are many benefits beyond just our lives being easier to lead and corporate profits. This sort of flexible working would readdress some of structural issues we have on gender, particularly when, in the majority of cases, the mother still has primary care responsibilities with children. This approach would reduce stress and has been shown in some studies to improve wellbeing and therefore mental and physical health. A great focus on flexibility has even been shown to reduce our carbon footprints, allowing people to work from where they are rather a preset location.

Finishing, on a grander and more wide ranging point, in these days where the fundamentals of capitalism are under attack, where the gap between the have and have nots is not only widening but more visible and the future of the economies and societies of the west are unclear at best, we need some radical new approaches.

I acknowledge that some of the examples and approaches I have mentioned in this blog are not universally applicable. Healthcare, for instance, would need its own approach. Karl Marx foretold a point where capitalism would implode in on itself, where the proletariat would rise up and overthrow capitalists. I’m not predicting anything as revolutionary as that, but as a free market capitalist myself why tempt fate when you have here a win-win situation where both the employer and the employee benefit.