• How's your work-life balance? Join the discussion

Dianne: "It's pick-up time at the day care, and the rush is on."

Dianne to mother: "So out of five days a week, how often are you rushing to get here?

Mother: "How many days am I not rushing to get here is the question."

Dianne: "It's a dollar every minute you're late."

Father: "We always rush.. we try to divide the responsibilities and it's always a struggle."

Woman: "It's tough, struggling with a little one and working full time."

Dianne: "And why was this dad making the 20-yard dash today?"

Father: "Today was a long meeting. Just one of those long days."

Dianne: "How are you feeling right now, stressed out?"

Father: "Yeah. Basically, yeah."

Dianne: "But it's not only people with kids who struggle to balance the demands of work and home."

Nora Spinks, consultant, addresses a group: "If you could just raise your right hand if you currently have any children in your life."

Dianne: "One Tuesday morning, north of Toronto..."

Nora: "If you currently have anyone in your life over the age of 55, raise your other arm."

Dianne: "...a group of human resource executives..."

Nora: "If you've experienced in the last 12 months any kind of change in your workplace, raise your right leg." (Group laughs)

Dianne: "...take part in an exercise, designed to highlight the single most pressing workplace issue:"

Nora: "If you've been leading anybody experiencing change in the workplace, make that leg go up and down." (More laughter)

Dianne: "Stress."

Nora: "As you can see from this very full room this is a very hot topic."

Dianne: Nora Spinks is Canada's leading consultant to business on this issue.

Nora: "We've seen an alarming increase in the amount of stress leaves that people are on. It's one of the fastest growing short-term disabilities that there is that employers are now having to look at."

Dianne: "The toll is measured in growing absenteeism, disability claims, high turnover, and drug plan costs spiralling out of control, growing on average 16 per cent a year."

Bernadette Mitchell, Co-operators Insurance: "As far as drugs, through benefit programs, anti-depressants are rising substantially, sleeping pills, things like that."

Dianne: "The pace of life is accelerating, as people rush to fulfil the demands of both work and personal responsibilities. Family needs, childcare, elder care, combined with overwhelming workloads. It makes your head hurt to think about it."

Nora: "The research shows that most Canadians feel that currently their lives are out of balance."

Dianne: "Balance. It's such a simple concept, such a difficult state to achieve. And what's all the more troubling is that it's not as if the struggle to balance work and life is a new problem. Corporations have been aware of it and working on it, for more than 20 years. In the early '80s, when the baby boomers started having children, employers had to make accommodations or else lose a big chunk of their staff."

Nora: "A large proportion of the workforce was women with young children, and in fact the largest segment of that was women with children under the age of two, unheard-of historically in any large volume."

Dianne: "Then the downsizing phenomenon hit. Workloads expanded, and suddenly everyone - not just parents -- needed balance. Back in '96 Venture reported on companies like Nortel, with on-site fitness facilities, and employee assistance plans."

Nora: "We saw the emergence of fitness programs, career breaks and sabbaticals and things like that, that kind of rounded out the package that began with day care centres and flex time and job sharing and telework."

Dianne: "But the co-author of the biggest-ever, national survey on work-life issues, says it's not working: Canadians are more stressed than ever."

Linda Duxbury: "If we look about a decade ago, only about 10 per cent of the workforce was working a 50-hour-plus week. We now see that about one in four people are working that many hours."

Dianne: "Her study compares the feelings of 3,200 Canadians in 1991, to the same number of people's feelings in 2001. The results: stress and depression are up dramatically. Life satisfaction is down."

Linda: "We see actually 40 per cent of professional and managerial women, and one in three men in management and professional positions saying that the way they're planning on coping is simply not having kids. It's horrible."

Dianne: "In Guelph, Ontario, Co-operators Insurance is expanding its on-site gym, offering employees a wellness program that includes kick-boxing, karate, and a cafeteria with healthy choices."

Bernadette: "We believe that healthier, happier employees are more productive. Retention increases, people stay with an organization longer."

Peter Hausdorf reads from survey: "Because of my job I didn't have the energy to do things with my family..."

Dianne: "But this expert in industrial psychology - who conducts employee surveys for companies says many of his clients won't face up to the most critical factor in the balance problem: workload."

Peter: "They seem reluctant to deal with the fact that the issue is the amount of work, workload, and what they'd rather do is focus on other aspects. So we'll have fitness facilities to deal with stress, we'll provide additional resources for childcare. These are good things, but they're not dealing with the core issue, which is the volume of work."

Man: "Very heavy, very heavy. Seven days a week, my boss works me 9 to 5. Evening seminars. Weekends I'm doing presentations."

Dianne to man in street: "Has it changed?"

Man: "Yes it has."

Dianne: "In what way?"

Man: "It's increased."

Woman: "Somebody left and I had to take over some duties."

Dianne to man: "How's your balance between the demands of work and your home life?"

Man: "Terrible."

Dianne: "In what way?"

Man: "Too much work."

Dianne: Nora Spinks says even business cards tell the story.

Nora in presentation: "Now you look at business cards, and there's probably six, seven, eight numbers down there. There's cell numbers, there's pager numbers, there's direct numbers, there's voice mail numbers, there's reception numbers, there's fax numbers."

Dianne: "Companies have been claiming for years that human resources are their most valuable resource -- yet many of the same companies continue to ask people to do more with less."

Linda: "Over the decade I've really seen what I would say is a fair amount of hypocrisy, where employers like to talk about it, but in many cases you don't see the change from the employee point of view. And our data is quite unequivocal: things have gotten worse, not better."

Dianne to Bernadette: "The obvious thing, I suppose, if you're trying to balance your work and life, why not reduce some of the work?"

Bernadette: "That's not always possible in the corporate world today. You've got to balance profitability as well as balance work-life. There's a fine line there."

Dianne: "Here's something you don't see every day: a chief executive officer who admits he's pushing his people too hard."

Courtney Pratt: "A lot of people worked a lot of weekends and long hours to get us there and they continue to do that."

Dianne: "Courtney Pratt says he's sensitive to his staff's workload, but that his company faces a May first deadline, when electricity will be privatized in Ontario."

Courtney: "When you get into a crunch like we're in, there's not a whole lot you can do, other than to empathize with people. You tell them you understand their concerns, you do whatever you can to try and get them the time off that they need, but quite frankly we need their intellectual horsepower right now and it's not an option."

Dianne: "Pratt started his career in human resources, and says he'd love to offer more supportive policies. But he also says he's hamstrung by a competitive marketplace."

Courtney: "The notion that you can just go off on your own and blaze a new trail, unless you're a lot smarter than other people, and you've got a biz model that works in some miraculous way, it's very, very difficult to go out ahead of the pack on this sort of thing, and incur the kinds of costs that these things sometimes bring on."

Dianne: "Health Canada's researcher says it's far more costly to do nothing."

Linda: "Excuse me but how can you afford to operate this way? Afford in a number of senses. Look at your absenteeism. Look at your turnover. Look at your prescription and benefits costs. Look at your succession planning. And excuse me, but right now we're moving into an employment crunch."

Dianne: "That may be the biggest motivator for change right now -- the need to keep good staff."

Nora: "If you're competing for the same people as somebody else and they're offering flexibility and supportive work environments, and stress-free opportunities, people are going to be attracted to there before they're attracted to an organization where it's rigid, it's structured, it's high stress."

Dianne: "Remember our running (day-care) dad? He avoided the late charge, but not the stress."

Father: "It just depends on the day, you know, it really just depends on the day. And today, unfortunately, was a bad day."

Dianne: "You did make it today though."

Father: "I did."

Dianne: "He'll do battle with the balance issue again tomorrow."