by Lori Sokol, Ph.D.
Rumors about the death of work/life balance are greatly exaggerated. Despite newspaper headlines blaming the recession for cuts to employee work/life arrangements as recently reported in the Los Angeles Times, ‘Work-Life Benefits Fall Victim to Slow Economy,’ and in The Washington Post, ‘As Cuts Loom, Will Working From Home Lead to a Layoff?’, more creative yet less costly work/life options are actually on the upswing amongst the most clever of companies.
These innovative companies are offsetting employees’ emerging economic woes by providing more pertinent perks like free lunches, free financial advice and, yes, even free Wii. Consider, for example, GotVMail, a Boston-based tech company that provides phone services reminiscent of the dotcom age. The company spends $1,000 a month having fresh fruit and healthy snacks delivered to the office, and also provides employees with free financialand legal advice. Further, the company continues to pick up 75 percent of the cost of health benefits, despite its steady increase over the past few years. But the most popular perk among its 48 employees is the Nintendo Wii, which is playedon a flat-screen TV in a room adjacent to the office kitchen. "For a small investment, it’s a lot of fun and really gets people moving," says David Hauser, company co-founder. It has become such an appealing benefit, in fact, that some employees even come to the office on the weekends to play the game.
But affording opportunities for free lunches or playing video games during working hours provides benefits that go far beyond fun. At public-relations firm Weber Shandwick, Ken Luce, president of the firm’s California and Southwest offices, says that when free food is brought in, employees tend to eat as a group, encouraging collaboration and boosting morale. While it may cost more to provide lunch at the firm’s offices, which ranges from $7 to $12 per person, it makes employees happy which, he says, also offsets "the cost of turnover," since it's much cheaper to buy lunch and retain valued employees than it is to hire and train new workers.
It should be no surprise that providing workers with opportunities to ‘kick back’ and ‘relax’ whether through in-house diningor video game play is becoming increasingly important as the country undergoes a recession. For the very root of the word, recession, is recess – defined as atime for pause, reflection and adjustment. Although the idea of change can initially feel unsettling, it is important to keep in mind that according to ‘change management theory, ’the first response to any adjustment, economic or otherwise, is fear andresistance, followed by the second more productive response of acceptance and exploration. This is as true for an organization as it is for an individual. The longer the period of fear and resistance, however, the more difficult it is to move on to the next phase of examining new options. A recession can therefore present an ideal opportunity for a business to re-think its situation, and ultimately explore more creative opportunities, if it doesn’t wait too long.
Previous economic downturns provide a testament to the timely and long-term benefits of undergoing change. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Kellogg's instituted a six-hour workday in its plants to take up the slack of too many people and not enough jobs. Within two years, workers were accomplishing as much in six hours as they had in eight because they were less tired and more efficient. The policy was so popular that remnants of it continued for the next 50 years. This concept of ‘flexicurity’, offering workers a combination of fewer work hours but more job security, has also proven to be highly effective in France, a country viewed as a global leader in this area after instituting shorter workweeks in the mid-90s. It is true that shorter work days also result in smaller paychecks, but as Benjamin Hunnicutt, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa says, “We have been selling off our leisure over thelast 30 years. Workers can lose some wages,” he continues, “…(but) the adjustments…are for the most part positive.”
Companies like GotVMail and Weber Shandwick, however, are successfully blending work and relaxation in one location, at the office, and the importance of this cannot be underestimated. Work life balance is currently cited as one of the most important labor issues, second only to compensation, according to the Corporate Executive Board which concluded in a recent study that employees who feel they have better work-life balance tend to work 21% harder than those that don’t. And this is something all companies can benefit from, regardless of economic times.
Lori Sokol, Ph.D., is the Founder and Publisher of Work Life Matters magazine. She can be reached by emailing lori@sokolmediaonline.com
*Correction to May Leading Today: You can visit Lori Sokol's website via www.sokolmediaonline.com