Work-life balance
UNISON's 2002 launch of a work-life balance campaign aimed to inform members and promote the potential benefits of work-life balance for service delivery and staff satisfaction.
Documents & Links
Work-life balance: Rhetoric versus reality? An independent report commissioned by UNISON from the Work Foundation.
Acrobat PDF
Work-life balance campaign
www.unison.org.uk/worklifebalance/
Acrobat PDF
Work-life balance campaign
www.unison.org.uk/worklifebalance/
The case for work-life balance tends to be made on two counts. First, that work-life balance improves individuals' health, wellbeing and job satisfaction. Second, that business can benefit from work-life balance because these policies improve productivity and worker commitment; reduce sickness absence; increase retention rates for talented workers; allow organisations to recruit from a wider pool of talent; and enable organisations to offer services beyond usual business hours.
The business case arguments have had particular resonance with the public sector, where a high proportion of the workforce is female and there is a drive to provide increasingly customer-focused services at more flexible times, requiring differentiated patterns of work.
UNISON commissioned this project from the Work Foundation to improve its understanding of work-life balance among members, to analyse the extent to which the growing awareness and popularity of work-life balance has translated into cultural change, and to develop recommendations about how organisations in the public sector need to move debates and practice forward.
