Participants required to take part in work-life balance survey

If you want to help find out what is going in British workplaces then please find the time to fill in this questionnaire.

It's part of an ongoing project and I filled a questionnaire in some time ago - it won't take long and it's quite good to know someone out there is building up a picture of what it's like to balance home and work at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Some further details to go on if you are so far unconvinced:

This questionnaire is being conducted by the Work Life Balance Centre together with the University of Wolverhampton and Coventry University to discover what is happening in today's workplace.

Work life balance is the way you divide up your time between work, your family, your hobbies or other aspects of your private life.

If one part of your life dominates all of the others and you do not want it to be that way, your life is out of balance.

The survey is trying to uncover to what extent work is dominating many people's lives, and the effect this has.

The information collected in this survey is completely confidential.

The answers given will be used to draw up a general picture of what is happening at work today and what could be done about any problems revealed.

Your help in completing the survey is very much appreciated.

Please feel free to inform colleagues and friends about the survey or forward this site address to them.

Work life balance and ethical behaviour

Deloitte and Touche has just released a podcast that looks at the “Critical Balance between Work Life and Ethical Behavior.”

A summary of the podcast:

"The behavior of leaders is the most critical element in establishing an ethical workplace culture.

What must leaders consider each day and how do leaders think about ethics in the work force?

What behavioral influences do employees look to for ethical guidance?

What work-life strategies promote an ethical environment that attracts and retains the top-level talent necessary to grow and sustain America’s corporations?"

The podcast also seems to coincide with some survey results that tries to make a connection between work life balance and ethical behaviour - see press release.

What employers need to know

A new report from FDS International is said to answer some vital questions for all employers.

The aim of the report is said to be about presenting "a more ‘balanced’ discussion of the important issues behind worker satisfaction and help employers in their quest to find and retain the best employees."

The questions the report claims to ask include:

– Which aspects of employees’ working lives are most important
for overall job satisfaction?
- How important is satisfaction with pay?
- How important is the working environment?
- And how important is work-life balance?

The results are quite extensive and not generally summarised in the report - there are four sections and four summaries as well as extensive comparison between workers from all over the world.

For more details download What workers want: A Worldwide Study of Attitudes to Work and Work-Life Balance here.

The rhetoric and reality of work-life balance

"Employers in the public sector ‘talk the talk’ on work-life balance, but have only low levels of commitment to changing standard working patterns in practice – and in some cases deliberately block people from flexible working or grant requests only to selected favourites.

This is the conclusion of a new report from The Work Foundation, commissioned by UNISON, the public service union, which set out to examine the experience of work-life balance in the public sector."

A press release on the report can be found here. The report - Work-life balance: Rhetoric versus reality? (Fiona Visser and Laura Williams).

Strategies for dealing with work-related depression

The latest report to emerge from some research conducted by the Work Life Balance Centre looks at the condition of depression.

In Flat out and fed up? Why depression is becoming one of the biggest work life balance issues it is suggested that there has been "an alarming increasing in depression and anxiety as symptoms of a stressful working environment."

Later on in the brief report are a range of strategies to help deal with diagnosed and undiagnosed depression. Something for the office noticeboard, particularly at this time of year.

The Work Life Balance Centre also has a specific web-page with a range of informative articles on the much broader subject of work-life balance.