How is your work life/personal life balance?

Citation

Clark, R.B. and Morgan, B.S. (2001), "How is your work life/personal life balance?", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 29 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2001.26129eab.002

How is your work life/personal life balance?

How is your work life/personal life balance?

Richard B. Clark

Richard B. Clark is vice-president of Pharmacia Corp. and currently leads Pharmacia's Financial Shared Services organization (www.pharmacia.com). Prior to the merger of Monsanto and Pharmacia & Upjohn, he was vice-president and corporate controller of Monsanto Company..

Brian S. Morgan

Brian S. Morgan is director of Organization Assessment Services at the Metrus Group in Somerville, NJ (www.metrus.com). His most recent work has involved the design and implementation of strategic measurement systems, employee surveys, internal customer surveys, and employee/customer linkage studies.

The case study contained in the last feature article in this issue describes how Monsanto's financial services group (IFS) reengineered itself by defining its business goals, establishing metrics, and setting forth guidelines for how they would work together. In the process, they created a basic set of values to serve as operating principles for the entire organization. The values they identified were teamwork, innovation, risk taking, honesty, change leadership, having fun, and work/life balance.

Table I Employee work/life survey

Table II Family work/life survey

Surveys were custom-designed to assess performance on each of the organization's vision and values issues. Questions on the employee survey included the issue of work life/personal life balance – one of the stated values. The statements are reproduced in the employee work/life survey shown in Table I. On this five-point scale, how would you assess your work/life balance?

The same items were given as a stand-alone survey to families. Employees had the option of taking this survey home and asking a significant other to complete them. If you wish, you may use the following family work/life survey (shown in Table II) to find out what your family thinks about your work/life balance.

In general, the IFS results showed that balance was a potential area for improvement and that associates' ratings on the issue were more favorable than the ratings given by family members.

The importance of balance was underscored by a linkage analysis at IFS. The analysis showed that there were very direct linkages between work/personal life balance and other aspects of employee satisfaction/commitment on the one hand and internal customers' ratings of quality of service on the other. To improve balance, IFS launched a training initiative aimed directly at the issue.