Based on new evidence from 150 firms (employing over 8000 workers), Work-Life Advantage analyses how employer-provision of ‘family-friendly’ working arrangements - designed to help workers better reconcile work, home and family - can also enhance the capacities of creative workers (and their respective employers) for learning and innovation, in pursuit of long-term competitive advantage. This extract reflects on those issues from the perspective of academic work-lives.

1. Extract from James (2017) on Academic Work Lives (see Chapter 8)
On my way out the door, I would like to bring the book full circle, back
onto academics themselves. My analysis shows that work-life conflict
reduces the effectiveness of knowledge workers to do their jobs
effectively. It also shows that providing (and encouraging workers’ use
of) ‘alternative’ working arrangements designed to enable workers to
achieve a better balance between the demands of paid work, home and
family also offers multiple learning advantages to employers. In
portraying the kinds of work-life demands on IT workers as documented in
Chapter 5 - including responsiveness to the demands of fee-paying
‘customer’, pervasive evening and weekend working, demands for overseas
travel, pressures to network with peers afterhours, increasing workloads
- the similarities with academic work-lives are striking. So too, the
kinds of everyday coping mechanisms used by academic colleagues to muddle
through (but which invariably short-change family), and the negative
effects of this on patterns of career progression amongst female
colleagues with children (the academic Mommy Track), and indeed some male
colleagues (the academic Daddy Track?). Likewise, the gendered
constraints on cross-firm job-to-job mobility as documented in Chapter 7,
as a function of workers’ concerns to avoid disruptions (to delicately-
balanced commuting patterns combining nursery, school, and a partner’s
commute; redistribution of domestic duties; possible relocation of home
and school; and disruptions to established networks of family and
community support) are also very apparent within academia, and extend
well beyond dual-career academic couples. In short, I could have been
writing about so many of my academic colleagues.

2. These patterns of work-life conflict amongst academics emerge from the
demands of juggling multiple core activities of research, teaching,
administration, student mentoring with extra-curricular responsibilities
and commitments around personal life and family. These work-life
conflicts form the focus of a recent book by US-based academics Maggie
Berg and Barbara Seeber (2016) The Slow Professor: Challenging the
Culture of Speed in the Academy, which calls for a slow-down in the pace
of academic life through collective reform (rather than piecemeal
individual fixes), and to ‘take back the university’. Here in the UK,
the combined pressures of the Research Excellence Framework, National
Student Survey, Research Impact Agenda, Teaching Excellence Framework and
VC concerns to rise up through multiple university ranking tables are
manifest through increased instances of work-related stress amongst
academics, and motivate a major campaign by the UK’s University and
College Union (UCU) to improve work-life balance in UK academia.
Likewise, the growth of the UK’s Athena SWAN Charter initiative,
concerned to promote the career advancement of women in STEMM subjects
(and recently expanded to include humanities and social science) is also
revealing in relation to the lived realities of work-life conflict
amongst female academics. Through my involvement in four separate Athena
SWAN bids to date, our cross-faculty consultations have documented
multiple instances of female colleagues on reduced hours contracts but
who maintain full hours workloads; a widespread inability and/or
unwillingness to use their full holiday entitlement because the pressure
to publish precludes this; and recent returners from maternity leave who,
despite clear provision in REF for a pro rata reduction in the required
portfolio of 4 papers, are still asked to submit 4 so as not to lessen
the size and quality of departmental submissions ‘unnecessarily’.
Likewise, the absurdity of academic staff time use surveys which continue
to cap the working week at 35 hours (less than half of the real figure
for many colleagues). Also revealing are the kinds of responses by
university employers. In Chapter 5, I identified IT workers’ concerns
around ‘fruit-bowl-type’ employer responses that target the symptoms of
work-life conflict rather than deal with their fundamental causes.
Sadly, such responses are not limited to technology employers. In one
London-based Russell Group university, the managerial response to a 2015
staff survey that identified significant problems of work-life conflict
amongst academic staff was to provide opportunities for colleagues to
purchase body massages. Similarly, colleagues at another London-based
Russell Group university were encouraged to destress by taking up the
opportunity to stroke a guide dog puppy.
My suggestion then is that employer scepticism around the so-called
‘business case’ for work-life balance is far from restricted to
technology employers. Rather, we too have a way to go in academia to
recognise and endorse the multiple learning advantages that accrue to
workers and employers alike through the provision and take-up of
‘alternative’ and ‘non-traditional’ working arrangements that better
enable workers to reconcile competing demands and responsibilities of
paid work, home and family. The key findings of this book around a more
progressive WLB ‘dual agenda’ suggest that we may well benefit from a
rethink.
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