WORKING TO LIVE, OR LIVING TO WORK?  

Half of today’s young professionals feel that they lack work-life balance and would consider leaving their jobs because of it, despite the potential impact of the credit crunch on the graduate jobs market, a new report has revealed. 

“Working to Live, or Living to Work?” was commissioned by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) and carried out by Dr Jane Sturges at King’s College London. The report’s findings will present a challenge for the UK’s graduate employers as retention of recruits becomes increasingly difficult but commercial pressures mean a long-hours culture is often the norm.

Carl Gilleard, Chief Executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, said: “At a time when many organisations are under financial strain, it is very tempting to let quality slip and to abandon policies such as work-life balance altogether. After all, the thinking may go, graduates are lucky just to have a job. However, our advice is that employers ignore or adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to work-life balance at their peril.”   

This report takes a fresh look at the issue and is designed to help employers understand what the term means to today’s ‘Generation Y’ graduates and how their perspective is likely to change with time. It outlines a number of ways that employers can address the urgent need to help graduates achieve a balance between work and home life – and explores the negative effects for both employer and employee of not doing so, including absenteeism, stress, reduced productivity and commitment, damaged relationships with friends and family, and poor health.

The qualitative study was based on extended interviews with 40 representative graduates with around three years work experience in seven public and private sector organisations, including Allen & Overy, KPMG, Shell and the Audit Commission. Employers at the organisations were also interviewed about their HR practice.

Graduates answered a series of questions on work-life balance which was defined as: “feeling no conflict between work demands and interests and obligations in your life outside work.” The responses suggest that attitudes to work-life balance are far more complex than the desire to simply work shorter hours, and that employers need to be more thoughtful when developing working policies and practices in this area.

The report identifies three types of graduates:  

• Work hard, play hard: the first and largest group defines work-life balance as a clear separation between work and their lives outside work, with set working hours.
• Worried and weary: the next group defined poor work-life balance as ‘spillover’ from work to home life: they did not necessarily work long hours but found the stress of work often affected their enjoyment outside it left them tired and lacking in energy. The majority of people in this group were women.
• Willing workaholics: the final group of graduates, perhaps most characteristic of the so-called Generation Y born after 1982, was happy to put in extra hours as long as they had some choice and control in deciding how to divide their time.  This group was most happy to blur the boundaries of their work.

Those graduates who felt they had poor work-life balance reported long hours, lack of work breaks, poor management, long commutes and studying for professional qualifications as major causes. The knock-on effects including decreased job satisfaction, lost friendships, damaged home life, stress and health problems, and less commitment to their job.

Some were willing to tolerate poor work-life balance in the short-term for pay and career progression, or because of a bad jobs market. Many, however, felt they would rather find another job entirely, sending a clear message to organisations that fail to address the problem that they could be facing the HR equivalent of a ticking time-bomb.

Gillard concluded: “Employers risk creating a ‘misery culture’ for graduates and, while even the best recruits may bide their time through the economic downturn, as soon as the situation improves, they will leave. Once that damage is done to an employer brand it is hard to undo.”

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