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Are you getting the balance right?

The desk is inescapable; holidays go unused; family members become strangers. In the recession, life usually loses in the battle with work. But does it have to?

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The other day, as I was standing on the touchline watching my 12 year-old play his last rugby match of the season, I got talking to another of the fathers about our work-life balance. It was midweek, you see, and we should have been at work. "I'll make up for this by working until nine tonight," he said. I was planning to do the same.

As he runs his own television production company, with his wife, he didn't need to feel guilty as such, but he admitted he did find it hard to switch off. "Even here, watching this," he said, "I find my mind is on work. I don't think that affects employees as much as bosses."

Speaking of bosses, David Cameron has described how living over the Downing Street shop gives him more of a family life than he had when he was leader of the opposition, because he can pop upstairs to see the children during the day. Combined with his "date nights" with SamCam, even his political enemies would have to admit he practises what he preaches, and what he preaches is that we all need to work on our work-life balance. "It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money," he once said, "and it's time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB - general well-being." That was in 2010, before the last election. Since then the tough economic climate has made talk of "the work-life balance" look like an indulgence.

But is it? According to the Office for National Statistics, just over 48 per cent of adults still have "relatively low satisfaction" with their work-life balance and believe they spend too long at their desks. Not only that, more than one-third of employees eat lunch at their desks. And research by Thomson Holidays shows that half of working parents don't use up their holiday allowance, and that one in five of us feels too busy at work to get away. Unsurprisingly, the recession, and the fear that we may lose our jobs, has only exacerbated this trend.

And yet, according to a recent Parliamentary report, not having sufficient time away from work has a detrimental effect on the economy - because if you get "the balance" right you can not only improve the health of the workforce but also its efficiency and creativity.

This is why work-life balance is about to return to the political agenda. From next year, if the new Children and Families Bill is passed by Parliament, the right to request flexible working hours will be extended to everyone, not just the lucky few who work for enlightened companies such as Ernst and Young.

Actually the Bill doesn't mention Ernst and Young as such, but Forbes magazine does, having recently named it the best accounting firm in the world to work for. This is because it offers all its employees flexitime and has found that for each additional 10 hours of holiday they take, year-end performance rates increase by eight per cent.

I spoke to Lynn Rattigan, the deputy CEO of Ernst and Young UK, and was surprised by what she had to say. Despite her high-powered job, she manages to spend every Wednesday with her two three-year-old twin daughters. Her husband also works a four-day week so they not only have what she calls a "Mummy Day" but also a "Daddy Day". For the other three days the girls go to a nursery.

"Our belief is that as long as you can connect the needs of the business to the needs of the individual there is no reason why you can't do reduced hours," she says, "even if you are in a fairly senior position. Reward is linked to output rather than input."

Part of what informed this innovative approach was the realisation that, for a global company at least, the idea of working nine to five is no longer relevant. "Whose nine to five are you talking about?" Rattigan asks. "America's nine? Singapore's five? One of my biggest clients is based in Singapore so every Tuesday morning at 7am, there is a big conference call, which is the end of the working day their time. My early start on Tuesdays means I can be more flexible about how I spend my time for the rest of that day."

She uses a BlackBerry; is it still switched on on Wednesdays? "Yes, and if there is something mega urgent my office knows they can call me or text me. But if it isn't urgent they can email me and I will reply in the evening.

"I've found that if I make sure everyone is aware of what I will and will not do on a Wednesday, it works."

"The danger, funnily enough," she adds, "is in becoming more accommodating and flexible because then people get confused about what you're prepared to do. Flexitime only works when you are being loud and proud about it."

When I ask whether, for all those good intentions, she nevertheless thinks about work on Wednesdays, she laughs. "Yes, but in a good way. For me it's like having a weekend in the middle of the week. I drift off and think about work problems in a more creative way than if I was at my desk."

In some ways, BlackBerrys and iPhones have liberated office workers because you don't have to be tied to the desk. The downside is that everywhere becomes the office.

According to Professor Leslie Perlow of the Harvard Business School, smartphones not only invade our family lives but also our psyches. She has surveyed thousands of managers and professionals in high-pressure jobs in 84 countries and found that 70 per cent were addicted to checking their smartphones each day within an hour after getting up, 56 per cent did so within an hour before going to bed, and 48 per cent checked them over weekends. More than half did so on holiday.

In recent years, then, a new question has entered the work-life debate: is achieving a balance our responsibility, or that of the company we work for?

Julia Hobsbawm is the founder of the networking business Editorial Intelligence and the author of The See-Saw: 100 Ideas for Work-life Balance. She's also the mother of three children and two stepchildren. When I emailed her I got the following bounce-back: "Hi there. Slow is the new Fast: I now aim to reply closer to 24 hours than 24 minutes or 24 seconds. I hope you don't mind. Julia." It made me smile, I say, when we catch up on the phone later (when she is driving to a lecture, because she likes to multitask).

"Yes, I've had a great reaction to that automated email," she says. "I've noticed that people don't rush to email me back, so the phone has become the urgent tool again." She's also a fan of what she calls "techno Shabbat". "It means that for 24 hours on a Friday, which happens to coincide with a family supper, I am incommunicado," she says. "I think we're permanently blurring the boundaries between work and life because of technology."

In 2007, Hobsbawm was hospitalised with pneumonia. After that she realised she had to change her lifestyle to survive. She discovered that if she applied business tactics to her home life, she could be 25 per cent more productive in 25 per cent less time.

Multitasking was the key. She would listen to a podcast while washing up, catch up on phone calls when walking to an appointment: "It's not so much about having it all as not drowning." A rigid routine is unrealistic, she believes. You need to go with the flow, but you also need anchored points for a stable family life, such as Sunday lunch and, in her case, film night. Hobsbawm admits it helps that her husband works from home and "does the washing, the cooking and the cleaning", but she insists they share the parenting.

Does she have any tips for anyone struggling to get the balance right? "I put sleep central to my efforts at work-life balance," says Hobsbawm, echoing the results of a recent Harvard study estimating that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63?billion a year. "A third of our time should be spent sleeping, a third working, and a third being with your family, friends and having a life. If you aren't getting a third of each you have to ask yourself why not.

"The challenge is to not think of ourselves as being victims at the mercy of all these choices. It's about managing the choices. So you also have to ask yourself: 'Do I like what I do and do I have any power to change jobs if I don't?'"

This idea that you need to find a job that you like is as old as, well, Confucius. "Choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life," he said. While this may be harder to do than to say, there is no denying that some companies are more fun to work for than others. Indeed, in California's Silicon Valley there has been a "perks arms race" in recent years.

Twitter has a rooftop garden, Dropbox has inter-office scooters, Skype has a pool-and-foosball room, YouTube has an indoor slide and Google has a hair salon, volleyball courts and, er, goats that roam the campus to make it look less like a place of work. The idea is that keeping workers happy and healthy is also the best way to keep them productive.

But not everyone buys into this idea, if only because it assumes that all office workers must be sociable extroverts. Susan Cain, the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, has warned that such "toys", as well as open-floor plans and an emphasis on spontaneous collaboration, prevent the kind of quiet thoughtfulness that introverts need in order to do their best work.

Nevertheless, there's a catchy phrase that goes with these examples of "enforced fun". Employees in progressive companies are being encouraged to "work smarter not harder". Research shows that so-called strategic renewal - including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, and longer more frequent holidays - boosts productivity, job performance and health.

Facebook goes further in believing that it is now unrealistic to try and separate home life from work completely. One executive has come up with the term "work-life merge" to describe a life in which work and free time are no longer neatly compartmentalised but seamlessly jumbled up together. According to this model it is not a big deal to take two hours out of the working day for something personal, but also routine to spend the same time answering emails on a Sunday.

There are no shortage of horror stories about people who get the work-life balance wrong: the investment banker whose children wave "Goodnight Mummy" to the flickering light of the Canary Wharf tower; the Google employees ferried from home to office on "Google buses" with no time in between to spend their money; or the Silicon Valley billionaire who boasts about not having had a holiday for four years. But getting it right is far from straightforward.

Indeed, according to a report from the Center for American Progress some top-level professionals even view a 40-hour week as "part-time" work. The report adds that part-timers are often seen as "time deviants" or "slackers". Another consideration is that those workers who opt for flexitime need to take into account what reduced hours might mean for their pension benefits: working less now may result in having to work more later.

Nigel Marsh believes that the real problem is that "people spend long hard hours working in jobs they hate to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like". He was the CEO of a successful advertising agency until he reached 40 and decided that, with four children under five, he had his priorities all wrong. He stopped drinking, took a year off work and now lives in Sydney earning a living writing books, giving talks and coaching executives about the work-life balance. "My belief is that you can have it all," he says, "you just can't have it all at the same time. You might decide that the way to happiness is not to have children but to become a high-powered hedge fund manager. If that's what makes you happy, go for it."

The main obstacle in the way of work-life balance, he reckons, is entrenched attitudes. "There's a group, nearly always men, who secretly enjoy the act of running out of dinner parties to deal with urgent calls, or having to rush home early from holiday."

And there's the rub. A recent survey by Prudential showed that a quarter of all retirees give up work reluctantly, partly because they still need the money, partly because, well, they simply enjoy their working life too much.

I have to say, I'm one of them. Regretfully, my children have grown used to the idea that my laptop is the sixth member of the family. My wife works too, as a headhunter for investment banks, and her BlackBerry is the seventh. We love our jobs. But it's also a school fees thing, this work-life choice we have made.

For the past two summers, I stayed at home working while my family went to Cornwall on holiday without me. But I've promised to join them this year; as Julia Hobsbawm says, it's not just a matter of making choices, it's also about managing them.
 

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