The Government established the Work-Life Balance Project in 2003 to develop “an integrated and coordinated policy programme to promote a better balance between paid work and life outside work.” The Department of Labour initiated a Work-Life Balance Programme in 2004 including a broad-based survey of needs and issues and other policy work.
A key element of this programme was the “Workplace Project” originally conceived as an action-research project. A mix of 14 public and private enterprises were selected to receive consultant and other support in undertaking a range of work-life balance projects that would be of benefit to them. This was also intended to inform the development of tools and resources and to assist the Department to better understand the interaction between policy and practice in this field.
The Project was also based on principles of partnership between employers, unions and the Government with the intention of achieving “win-win” solutions for all involved. A fuller description of the Workplace Project and the participating organisations is in appendix 1.
In 2007 the Department began an evaluation of the Workplace Project. This was not intended to be formal audit of the Project, but rather an exercise to draw out the lessons learned from it – what worked, what didn’t, what momentum it created, what factors contributed to positive results, what the experiences of these organisations contributed towards the preparation of generic resources and toolkits that can promote work-life balance more widely and so on.
Purpose
The aim of the evaluation was to examine:
1. the process used, including those parts of the process that were successful, intended and unintended outcomes of the process, and an assessment of what parts of the process might be improved or done differently;
2. the impact of the initiatives, against specific measures set by the organisation, or against expected outcomes, and on factors such as morale, productivity, communications, absenteeism, recruitment, staff turnover, hours worked and so on; and
3. the sustainability of work-life balance initiatives in workplaces over the longer term.
Methodology
The method adopted by the evaluation team for both stages involved developing a model of what success would look like based on the perspectives of different stakeholders. These stakeholders included the Department of Labour, Business New Zealand, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and the consultants who worked with the participating organisations.
The evaluation team then conducted interviews with a representative (given resource limitations) cross-section of the selected enterprises to gain an understanding of the actual experience of their work-life balance projects. The overall findings of the evaluation are a reconciliation of this “top-down and bottom-up” approach. In addition the aim of stage 2 was to see if there were insights and lessons that had not been captured in the first stage and to explicitly identify the differences between the experiences of the organisations in stage 1 and stage 2.