19. Conclusions from the case studies
- 19.1 Family-friendly provisions and how men are using them
- 19.2 Identifying what constrains men's take-up of these provisions
- 19.3 Policy implications
19.1 Family-friendly provisions and how men are using them
Both these companies have made every effort to be family-friendly, devising policies, educating management, informing staff, introducing the necessary cultural change and encouraging people to take up the options available. And yet they have had little success in persuading staff, at least in the case of their male employees, to take advantage of the flexible work conditions on offer. There is little use made by men of provisions which might be compatible with shared parenting, such as job-sharing and permanent part-time work. Instead, the men fashion one-off solutions by making use of family leave entitlements, flexible start and finish times and occasional telecommuting. Often this takes the form of informal arrangements negotiated and implemented at the most local level.
This remarkably similar result in both cases belies the differences between the companies. One is an almost classic model of a manufacturing industry, the other provides a vital public service. Each operates in a very different business environment, one the local branch of a global company subject to all the vagaries of a consumer market and the demand for commercial returns, the other imposing business disciplines upon itself in the belief that this increases efficiency and the quality of service. Moreover, there is an obvious contrast in the way each company has sought to develop and implement family-friendly policies. Company number one has placed the emphasis on the development of formal policies, while Company number two has made something of a policy out of not having a formal set of provisions and entitlements, while at the same time heavily supporting implementation on the ground. However, in practice, there is little difference between the companies (and most other Australian companies) in the actual implementation of policies. The reasons such divergent settings can produce such similar outcomes can be found, ultimately, in the reasons for the limited use male employees make of the entitlements available to them.
19.2 Identifying what constrains men's take-up of these provisions
The influences constraining men's take-up might be classified into four groups. First, there is the broad environment in which the company operates. Second, there are the contingencies inherent in the workplace, including the way work is arranged, the resources available and the culture of the organisation. Third, there is the employee's place in the interaction of work and family. Finally, there are issues of personal identity. Although these four classes of influence are analytically separable, in practice they are interwoven and interdependent.
Business environment
Both organisations have been subject to significant change. Company number one is concerned about maintaining local market share. There have been significant job cuts in the recent past. There is uncertainty about the future of local manufacturing operations and much is dependent on the success of a new product. Resources are very tight. There is a tangible sense of insecurity for employees.
Company number two has been transformed from an entity operating outside the market to one operating as though they were subject to competitive pressures and the profit imperative. Accompanying this move there have been reductions in staffing levels to the extent that workloads have increased and career progression has become dependent on demonstrated dedication through meeting performance indicators often requiring hours of work longer, sometimes much longer, than the standard negotiated for the EBA.
The workplace-long hours, limited resources, local solutions
Against a background of perceived insecurity, both workplaces have developed a culture of long hours of work. This actively discourages the use of special forms of leave designed to make it easier to balance work and family. Company number one, in an industry often plagued by absenteeism, still rewards employees who make no use of leave. This stance is seen by the male employees who participated in the research as diametrically opposed to the company's stated wish to be flexible.
Workload and hours of work
Heavy workloads leading to long hours of work tip any balance between work and family heavily in favour of work and against families. As such, they are among the central causes of work and life imbalance for male employees. Measuring workplace performance through outcomes rather than through set hours of attendance has the potential to increase flexibility tremendously, since the specifics of how and when the work gets done do not matter as long as key objectives are met on time. This is particularly the case with men who are reluctant at this point to take up options for working part-time, whether because they and their families need the income of a fulltime job, or because of concerns about career advancement. But if objectives are not carefully monitored and employees are asked to do too much, flexibility in the sense of having enough time apart from work to spend with family diminishes to vanishing point. What has become clearly evident in this research is that both these workplaces are characterised by high workloads and long hours of work.
Ironically, this is particularly the case amongst those employees whose work has the greatest potential for flexibility, senior professional and managerial staff. While workplace norms are changing to give higher level staff more responsibility and control over their own work performance, those norms are also changing to increase workloads to the point where work threatens to take over more and more of life.
While there is obviously an upper limit to this process—there are, after all, only 24 hours in a day—from the evidence presented by the participants in this research, workplace demands too often go beyond the limits of what is compatible with family life.
This question of workload was not emphasised in the literature reviewed in the first part of this report. Although it was sometimes mentioned briefly, it was not given the importance it came to assume in reports of the work experience of the participants in this research. And yet, neither formal policies, no matter how exemplary, nor informal arrangements, no matter how adaptable to meet a range of individual needs, are useful if excessive workloads mean fathers do not have enough time to take advantage of them.
The workloads discussed by many of the informants are not confined to these two companies. If recent research is any guide, overlong working days have become increasingly common in Australian workplaces. On the basis of ABS data, Pocock (2000) showed, for example, that the length of the average working day for full-time workers grew 1.6 hours between 1989 and 1999, and that a quarter of full-time workers were now working more than 49 hours a week (Pocock 2000, p. 98).
Using four ABS time-use surveys conducted in 1974, 1987, 1992 and 1997, Bittman and Rice (2002) showed that, among employed prime working-age men (25 to 54 years), both the average length of the working day and work at unsociable times of the day had increased over those decades.
Employees interviewed as part of the Fifty Families study (Pocock et al 2001), gave various explanations for this 'long hours culture'. Some interviewees said they worked long hours because they loved their jobs and because they were committed to their clients, whether students, patients or the general public. Others, however, felt they had no choice, that they were 'doing extra hours out of fear', fear of losing their jobs, fear of not being promoted, fear of being sidelined into dead end or undesirable areas, of not being permitted to work in their chosen fields. They talked about the pressures applied to persuade them into working longer hours, varying from outright requests, through having to deal with 'emergencies' (despite being a normal part of the operation of the organisation they worked for, e.g. ambulance services), to expectations which are never spelled out but which are understood by everybody. Pocock et al coined the seemingly contradictory phrase 'compulsory voluntary work' to refer to these pressures. This is work that is compulsory in the sense that there are negative sanctions for non-compliance, but 'voluntary' in the sense that it is unpaid. Like the participants in this current research, interviewees also attributed the overwork to understaffing: 'There just aren't enough people here to do the job anymore'.
The male employees in this study had the sense that they could not complete their tasks in the 38 hours per week for which they were paid. They felt (and some of their supervisors presumed) that they could not take time-in-lieu or rostered days off when the work was piling up and continued to do so. There was a feeling that crises at work were commonplace, that employees never got on top of the work no matter how hard they tried. All this fuelled the sense that, to be good providers, they could not disrupt the flow of their work, and that family must be fitted in around these workplace demands.
Resources to support policies
The issue of company resources to support the implementation of family-friendly policies regularly came up during the fieldwork at company number one. Senior management, supervisors, employees and the union all had differing opinions about the resources required. At one extreme were senior executives who praised the provision for being cheap to implement. After all, a job-sharing arrangement involved the company in little extra expenditure. At the other extreme were unions, employees, partners and some supervisors who argued that, in order for these policies to be thoroughly implemented, a large budget would be required to cover the extra staff in order to maintain normal levels of output. Our research suggests that staffing levels and workloads have a significant impact on work-family balance. While the senior executives are correct in suggesting that, in the narrow sense, family-friendly provisions are cheap, the effectiveness of these provisions turns on resourcing adequate levels of staffing. This obviously would require significant outlay.
Policy implementation and diffusion of information — supervisors' discretion
Supervisory discretion has the potential to be a supportive mechanism, and in the case of the supervisors in this research there were clearly many trying to actively manage their staff with due regard for their family responsibilities. Because the main way in which men use the company's provisions to balance work and family responsibilities is through informal negotiations with their supervisors (primarily for one-off situations such as the presentation day scenario used in the focus groups), then the role of their immediate supervisors is crucial. This is not only in the implementation of policy, but also in disseminating information and developing a workplace culture within their work area that is supportive of flexibility. Whilst some were happy to do this, others saw family-friendly provisions as a problem for them and as bad for the company. Hence discretion can be either inhibiting or enabling. The research suggests that the training of supervisors should be a policy priority.
Men, work and family
The pattern of men's use family-friendly provisions is informative. It provides some indication of the relative family responsibilities male employees and their partners assume in their households. Most men interviewed wanted to be good fathers but, on the whole, they didn't take much responsibility for parenting. None of the men in this study were the main providers of care, nor were any sharing family responsibilities 50-50 with their partners. On the other hand, they were all working hard to be the providers (breadwinners) for their families.
However, what is striking is that none of the male employees (or their partners) defined 'fatherhood' in terms of breadwinning. Men talked about family in the way Anthony Giddens (1992) has suggested is characteristic of contemporary families, that is, as 'pure relationship' rather than in terms of roles defined by tradition. Men want to have a relationship with their children. They hope to communicate more deeply with them than their own fathers did. Most fathers adopt a child-centred definition of relationship, and place the emphasis on being present in situations the child defines as meaningful and important. They allow the child to determine family leisure activities, neglecting their adult hobbies in favour of the activities that really excite their child. It is difficult to tell how much of this talk about fathering reflects a genuine desire for greater involvement in parenting, and how much is lip service to contemporary notions of the 'happy family'. Support for both interpretations can be found in what the various participants said.
In practice, few men were involved in 'the daily grind' of washing nappies, making school lunches, tidying up and so on. Men's capacity to develop 'nice' relationships was usually dependent upon their partners' doing the other less pleasant tasks, like being 'the disciplinarian', or getting dinner so he could play with the kids. Often the family responsibilities men were prepared to accept were relatively limited. Certainly, most men saw their parental role as an auxiliary to their wives'—giving their partners a break.
Nevertheless, the men said repeatedly they wanted to be more involved in their families. This commitment to parenting is one of the new forces behind the rising interest in men's (as opposed to women's) work and balance issues. Male employees become aware of work and family balance when their desire to be significantly involved their children's lives clashes with the on-going heavy demands of work.
These men regularly become conscious that work pressures prevent them from 'being there for them when they need me'.
The other side of this coin is men's commitment to work and the demands that their work places upon them. While there has been some increase in formal flexibility in the organisation of work, informally most men experience increasing pressure to work longer hours. The significance of work hours in shaping the use men make of familyfriendly provisions is one of the unexpected findings to emerge out of this research.
Cultural norms regarding appropriate roles for each sex remain a feature in decisions about family responsibilities and who should carry them out, whether by default (he is in the paid workforce because he earns the most and they have a mortgage) or by design (some male employees felt they themselves could not be the main carer). Many of the partners also said they wanted the level of involvement that they had in their children's lives. Men's unspoken assumption of the provider role also explains their reluctance to make use of flexibility provisions that reduce overall work hours (and therefore income). Maintaining a steady income for the household, especially meeting mortgage commitments, becomes the first priority.
Male employees' motivations to take up provisions
The evidence gathered in this research suggests that men lack strong personal motivation to put fatherhood, in the sense of 'being there', ahead of their work. The easy assumption of the role of family provider shows that men still derive significant elements of their identity as men from their ability to earn income. Overseas experience, as we have seen in the literature review, suggests that incentives for men to participate actively in parenting can be designed. Ultimately, these may change the way men not only think but also act as fathers. There is, however, no incentive for individual employers to introduce such schemes. They would need to be financed on some social insurance basis.
19.3 Policy implications
Policies encouraging men to increase their take-up of family-friendly provisions need to take the recognised barriers into account. If it is the case that men's reluctance is due to concerns about money and career, to certain meanings and values around masculinity, to heavy workloads, and to women's need and desire to care for children themselves, then policies need to address those issues.
Carlsen found, for example, from studying the outcome of 'family-friendly' entitlements for fathers in Denmark (1995, pp. 57-60), that the two biggest obstacles to fathers' increased participation in parenting were 'the financial aspect' and the fact that mothers generally wanted to take all the leave themselves (Carlsen 1993, p. 88). He suggested that flexible periods of leave, divided into shorter blocks of time or taken as part-time work, might assist with the financial barriers to fathers' uptake of parental entitlements (1995) (although the Norwegian experience with the Time Account scheme makes this option look less than hopeful—see section 3.3). A system of differentiated compensation, whereby payment was higher during the periods reserved for each parent and lower otherwise, could also be instituted to encourage fathers to use leave entitlements (Carlsen 1995).
To encourage men to share more equally in raising children, parental leave needed to be a personal entitlement of the father, in his view, and not dependent on whether or not the mother was in paid employment and herself entitled to leave. He was not entirely sure whether quotas were useful (1993, p. 89), but he did recommend at least one month of paternity leave at the time of the birth, and six months of parental/child care leave after the child is six months old (Carlsen 1995). He also said that information about men's access to leave needed to be widely disseminated, and networks for fathers on parental leave established to counteract isolation.
Following Levine and Pittinsky (1997), the Work and Family Unit (WFU), DEWR (1998, p. 3), has also made suggestions for creating a father-friendly workplace, the single most important of which, in the authors' view, is flexibility of working hours. The authors also outline a number of strategies firms can implement, including communicating the message that family-friendly policies are not 'for women only' and not just for men in senior positions, ensuring that support for family-friendly measures comes from the highest levels of management, focusing on work performance not on number of hours worked, providing opportunities for men to consult with each other and share experiences, disseminating information about company policies through a variety of media, and supporting fathers who need to stay home with a sick child. They recommend that firms introduce paid paternity leave (a recommendation which is not needed in most European countries since they already have paid paternity/maternity leave entitlements at the national level—see section 3.1). They conclude by warning against 'romanticising' working fathers, pointing out that in the long term, all parents should benefit from family-friendly policies.
In the interests of helping firms implement strategies such as these, the 'Men at Work' program was funded by FaCS along with a range of other programs under the Men and Family Relationships Pilot program. The program aims to provide services specifically targeted at men, and to develop policies in consultation with staff and to introduce creative work practices based on men's needs both at work and at home while increasing staff commitment and productivity (Work and Family 2001, p. 13).
However, according to the findings of the empirical research component of this study, at least one of these recommendations of the WFU—that employers focus on work performance rather than number of hours worked—could be counter-productive. At both the companies investigated, one of the chief barriers to men's use of familyfriendly provisions was the heavy workload (sections 12.7 and 18.5); and one of the key factors driving the increasing workloads in these firms, especially in the case of Company number two, was the organisation of work in terms of goals to be achieved rather than fixed hours of attendance (section 15.5). Of course, the real culprit was understaffing—as the male employees and their partners at both companies said over and over again, what was needed to reduce excessive workloads was 'more heads'. Hence, an outcomes-based workplace is more family-friendly than one based on fixed hours of work, only if staffing levels are adequate.
Overall, these barriers can be divided into two broad classes—those that are within the ambit of company control, and those that lie beyond the company.
For companies
Both companies included in this present study are already taking steps to deal with the issues discussed below (with the exception of the workload). However, the problems still exist and more work is needed if they are to be overcome.
In both companies researched for this present study, family-friendly provisions were available only to part of the company's workforce. They were much more likely to be available to salaried, professional employees whose performance is measured by outcomes rather than by set hours of work. Each company has significant proportions of its workforce to whom these conditions do not apply, either because the rigors of the production line, or the relentless demands of the Call Centre, permit less flexibility. Both companies are aware of these inequalities of access. Company number one views itself as being at the beginning of a process of transition to achieve universal coverage, and company number two believes it has developed further than most in spreading these conditions throughout its workforce.
A finding from both the case studies is that there is a tension between setting down family-friendly provisions in policy (as at company number one), and providing them on a case-by-case basis (as at company number two and to lesser extent company number one). Having a formal policy promotes uniformity of treatment and, therefore, settles many of the issues around entitlement and equity. While the management at both companies tended to prefer the case-by-case administration because it maximised flexibility, this ad hoc system militated against clearly understood, uniform standards of eligibility and implementation. Some formalisation of policy does seem to be an aid in the process of disseminating entitlements, and increasing and promoting take-up of family friendly provisions.
Whatever the specific provisions in either company, there are a number of lessons to be derived from studying the process of implementation. The support of senior management is vital. While most senior management endorsed the idea of accepting responsibility for creating the conditions that make it possible to combine work and family, some senior managers still needed to accept the idea that taking time out to parent does not mean that men are 'not serious' about their careers. These latter views are more consistent with the traditional view of men as breadwinners. Familyfriendly provisions assume that fathers should be more able to get involved as parents without jeopardising their careers.
At the level of workplace practices it is important that the immediate supervisors have a good knowledge of company provisions and how and when to implement them. There is scope for greater special training for supervisors. Thought might be given to developing such training programs. Company number two is working towards a model of this kind of training, devoting some of the work-time of middle management to training in work-family issues.
Employees are often poorly informed and unnecessarily wary of using existing provisions. Both supervisors and employees seem to rely on one-off solutions to short-term needs, with little thought given to planning for the regular and continuing demands of modern fatherhood. Previous research indicated that mothers are usually highly aware of their responsibilities to their family and plan their work around them. In contrast, most men still plan family time around the demands of work time. The companies could give some thought to how they might encourage greater awareness of company provisions and work schedule planning for parental responsibilities among male employees.
All these changes might be described as removing from the workplace tacit rewards for traditional model of a father-headed single income family household. This is a necessary step in converting family-friendly provisions into a gender-neutral set of conditions available to help parents balance their work and family lives.
In both companies a major barrier to men's take-up of provisions is long hours of work. Modern management practice is to devolve the responsibility for tasks and budget to the lowest possible units. For many white-collar, professional employees, this means meeting outcome objectives, with the company less interested in the detail of how this is done, so long it stays within allocated resources. Employees commented that the greatest difficulties arose when an extra task was simply assigned to an already overcrowded work program. This hands-off style of micro-management can lead to neglecting to monitor the feasibility of work objectives and time frames. Shifting the emphasis from fixed starting and ending times to devolved responsibility for outcomes is inherently more flexible, especially in the ways that the men in this study are likely to use. However, this flexibility can become irrelevant to work-family balance when expected outcomes cannot be achieved in something approximating standard hours.
The research revealed a paucity of relevant information for monitoring both leave and workloads, particularly at company number one. In this company, it is not possible to distinguish sick from family leave in the system of personnel records. This data would be useful in the context of on-going support and evaluation of the company's workfamily performance. In devising an appropriate record-keeping system, it is important to give some consideration to the problem of stigmatising family leave. Some focus group participants suggested that well publicised, widespread use of family leave was likely to change the organisational culture and help to de-stigmatise family leave. Monitoring would also permit companies to assess the strength of the business case for family-friendly provisions. A change in criteria for selecting winners of the ACCI Corporate Work and Family Awards might steer companies towards a more evidencebased policy.
Greater use of job-sharing possibilities was welcomed by all parties, management, unions and employees, as a way both of increasing flexibility and of maintaining labour levels so that work (and therefore additional pressure) didn't fall to other employees. More attention could be given to promoting more job-sharing arrangements, especially those compatible with contemporary norms of shared parenting and the new awareness of the need for fathers' involvement in parenting. The research indicates that, to promote greater use of job-sharing arrangements, households will need to find ways of replacing the income (and promotion prospects) that fathers forego, perhaps through the improved earnings of women.
Opportunities for policy makers
A significant number of the most severe barriers lie outside the company's immediate sphere of control. Public policy could play a significant role in reducing these barriers. Governments have a role to play in a number of areas.
Government has the opportunity to encourage men to become more involved in parenting when their children are very young, by establishing entitlements to paid paternity leave. Paid paternity leave avoids the problem of men having to choose between breadwinning and parental involvement. Bonding with a young child in the first year of its life is likely to have lasting effects on a father's relationship with his child. This could lead to far more profound changes than could be expected by providing some flexibility in start and finish times, access to a telephone, etc. It would also have the benefit of supporting different forms of masculine identity, rather than passively allowing a system designed for the single breadwinner family household to continue unmodified. Adopting paid paternity leave is never likely to be in the interests of any single company, and could only be financed on a social insurance basis and administered federally. Norway and other Scandinavian countries have shown that policy instruments encourage men to share more in parenting.
Another key role for government is in the regulation of working-time. This has been an important venue of policy activity in Europe with a lot of interest being shown in the French system of capping weekly hours of work, and in the Dutch experiments in having large proportions of both men and women working part-time. Once again, individual companies appear to have little opportunity to regulate the working hours of their employees while their competitors are free to operate with small numbers of staff, working long hours, much of it unpaid overtime. Probably only by central government changing the rules of the game is there much hope of reducing the impact of growing hours of work on the work-family balance.
Both these areas offer significant opportunities for policymakers to facilitate men fulfilling their ambitions to be good fathers. By increasing men's awareness and utilisation of company provisions, policymakers would be expanding the choices open to Australian family households, and increasing the ease with which they might combine their work and their family responsibilities.