Talking work-life balance in recruitment processes
Talking work-life balance in recruitment processes
“Work-life balance is a term commonly used to describe the balance that a working individual needs between time allocated for work and other aspects of life. Areas of life other than work-life can include personal interests, family and social or leisure activities.” This is how work-life balance is described on Wikipedia. Simple, isn’t it?
It’s maybe easy to define work-life balance as a concept, but it is quite a bit harder to transfer that concept into practice. Firstly, you would need to be able to classify where the border between work and the aforementioned “other aspects of life”. This seems to be exceedingly difficult as digital tools allow ever more work to be executed regardless of time or place, rather than being restricted to the office. Secondly, you would need to be able to quantify and determine where the balance between work and not-work lies. This balance, of course, is very subjective. For some people, it might mean, that you work at the office 8-16 and you can leave your laptop at the office when it’s time to go home. For some people it means freedom to choose workings hours. It doesn’t matter which time you work, if everything you should do gets done and on time.
Simply looking at the total number of hours dedicated to work provides an overly simplified view. It is important to factor in how those hours are distributed throughout the day and week as well.
Although everyone has a personal take on what constitutes good work-life balance, few can put their finger on what it means even for themselves, let alone others. It’s quite simply impossible to define universal level for work-life balance. That said, most employers cannot realistically tailor workloads and the distribution of work for each employee. But a good thing is, that you can always discuss it. Discussing this topic is especially important in the recruitment process. Since tailoring won’t be an option for most, making sure your recruits know what they sign up for, and vice versa, will be an important factor in whether the recruitment will be a success. Lacking a common frame of reference, these discussions easily remain abstract, so as a recruiting supervisor, you might find it helpful to pick up on relatable concrete examples to get your point across.
In your organisation, how do you speak about work life balance? Or is it a topic at all in your discussions? Don’t you know from where to start?
As a recruiting supervisor, you can think about this:
How did your organisation act during the corona crisis towards employees?
Your subordinate’s spouse is seriously ill. How do you show understanding?
Your subordinate has a child with special needs. How is it possible to help him/ her to make everyday life smooth?
Your subordinate is going through a big unexpected personal crisis. How do you react towards him/her?
As an employer, you can tell a job seeker some examples, how have you handled this kind of situations. The questions also work the other way around as well. As a job seeker, you can ask, how will employer react in this kind of situations.
The culture of organisation significantly influences how good work-life balance can be. Because everyone sees work-life balance differently, is there any other option than face each employee as an individual and openly speak about work-life balance?
As recruiters, we cannot be 100 % sure how different organisations understand work-life balance. But that is something, we try to understand when we get know new clients. And of course, try to convey it to candidates.
If you haven’t talked about work-life balance in your organisation, maybe it’s time to start now. Looking at it through the perspective of the ongoing crisis you can start by asking a current question: What are the elements of your job that enable you to have a good work-life balance and what has complicated it during the corona crisis?
Anna Haavikko
Researcher
