Working time arrangements and recreation: making time for weekends when working long hours.

• Author: Brown, Kerry
• Position: Contributed Article - Report

Abstract

Work time spread across the entire week, rather than the conventional five day working week, has meant that workers are now less able to utilise longer stretches of recreation time especially in gaining access to a full two-day break over a weekend. This paper explores the issues contributing to workers' acquisition of longer recreation time. It seeks to determine the effects of this acquisition on the quality of working and non-working time for the employee through a study of work-life balance in the construction industry. It finds that weekends are more important to achieving work-life balance than shorter days over a six-day week when working long hours. Further, 'personal time' is a key element in achieving satisfactory work-fife balance for employees, and this type of 'time' is often forgone in trying to integrate the necessary and desired non-work activities in the shorter time available to workers.

Introduction

Early industrial campaigns to reduce long working hours across the entire week also provided a defined break between sets of working days. The 40-hour week campaign featured the notion of eight hours labour, eight hours rest and eight hours recreation (Love, 2006). While each day can deliver a full eight hours work and eight hours rest, the main unbroken length of time for eight hours recreation is a long break, typically a weekend. Since the 1980s, however, there is evidence to suggest that opportunities for weekend 'long breaks' are being eroded through work intensification, longer working hours, split shifts and casual employment (Roberts 2007; La Valle et al. 2002). Such situations have had negative impacts on employees' ability to enjoy unbroken periods of recreation time, and the effect is particularly acute in industries characterised by a long hours work culture and pressured work environments (Campbell, 2002).

Unions have a history of mounting campaigns to reduce working long hours (Love 2006); but some industries, such as construction, retain long working hours (Lingard and Francis 2004). Within the construction industry, the six-day working week and long working hours have become an industry standard (Lingard and Francis 2004, 2005, 2007). This standard has resulted in the inability of many employees within the industry to acquire longer stretches of recreation time. Long work hours have been consistently linked to difficulties in balancing work and personal life (Guerts, Rutte and Peeters 1999; Moen and Yu 2000; Batt and Valcour 2003). The relationship between work hours and work-life balance is reported to be strong and direct. For example, Tausig and Fenwick (2001) report that as work hours per week increased, employees' work-life balance declined sharply. Hence it is reasonable to suppose that employees in the construction industry working more than 60 hours a week over six days, with only one day per week break, have scope to improve their work-life balance by alterations to their working time commitments. The question this paper examines is: how do these alterations affect the use of recreational time?

We explore the notion of the 'long break'--that is, a break of at least two days between the end of one working week and the beginning of the next. The literature review is structured around exploring the notion of long work hours and the consequences of balancing work and non-work activities. A brief overview of the long work hours nature of the construction industry is then presented, followed by the methodology used for the research. The findings illustrate the importance of quality recreation time and the 'long break' to the work-life balance of construction employees and present implications for research and organisational practice.

Literature Review

Work-life balance (WLB) has emerged over the last twenty years as an important social and employment issue. Guest's (2002, p. 263) definition of this term is a 'perceived balance between work and the rest of life'.

While work and family are an important sub-set of the work-life literature (Pocock and Clark 2005), studies are also examining a wide range of considerations that allow for combining work with other activities such as recreation. Ransome (2007) argues that the assumption that 'work' means paid work and 'life' refers to care work and family responsibilities is limited in that it ignores the importance of recreation. Work-life balance policies and working time arrangements are key elements in providing a satisfactory balance between work and non-work activities; but may create tensions within organisations.

WLB and Time Allocation

The deleterious effects of work-life imbalance have received extensive attention. Evidence suggests that these effects can range from family relationship breakdown (Pocock 2003), stress and burnout (Lingard 2004) and fatigue (Dawson et al 2001; Sluiter, Van Der Beek and Frings-Dressen 1999). Long and extended hours, irregular shifts and weekend work are some of the factors that contribute to negative work-life balance. Chatzitheochari and Arber (2009) examine the long work hours culture in Britain, and in particular the impact on sleep duration, finding that both men and women working very long hours were most likely to have short sleep duration. It has been long established that disrupted sleep and sleep deprivation can have a significantly deleterious effect on work performance (Dawson et al. 2001).

The increase in weekend work has also been examined, especially the effects of 'unsociable' work hours. Bittman (2005) argues that weekend work is justifiably considered 'unsociable' because of the numerous negative effects it has on family time and recreation. Bittman found that employees who worked on Sundays had less personal care time (e.g., sleeping, bathing and grooming), less involvement in community activities and fewer opportunities to catch up on domestic work, and experienced reduced social times and recreation. Working on Sunday was clearly associated with reductions in family time and the opportunity to pursue leisure activities. More importantly, Sunday workers were found to be unable to recuperate the lost time on other days of the week, with significant negative implications for work-life balance.

Work-life balance is a pertinent issue for Human Resource Management (HRM) as it is a key element of recruitment and retention strategies (De Cieri et al 2005). There is evidence to suggest that poor work-life balance leads to low morale, poor performance and risks to mental and physical health (Townsend et al. 2003; Mesmer-Magnus and Viswesvaran 2006). There is some evidence that where WLB initiatives are introduced successfully, there can be a positive association with reduced absenteeism, organisational performance and productivity (Allen 2001; Konrad and Mangel 2000; Perry-Smith and Blum 2000). For example, Perry-Smith and Blum, in their study of a national sample of U.S firms, suggest that firms with more extensive work-family policies have higher perceived firm-level performance. The perceptual measures of firm performance included organisational performance, market performance and profit sales and growth. Similarly Konrad and Mangel found that work-life balance programs have a positive impact on workplace productivity, which is measured by a standard measure of productivity--the logarithm of sales per employee. A number of studies has examined the take-up and effectiveness of work-life balance options and has identified a number of barriers to their implementation. A negative and unsupportive work-life culture is also a key issue for many firms (De Cieri et al. 2005; Bryan 2007). One way of promoting WLB is to shorten the duration of the working week while preserving the number of working hours. This type of initiative retains salary at the same level while delivering a shorter working week, particularly giving access to a weekend for those working six-day weeks. The compressed work week (CWW) refers to compressing the number of hours worked in a week into fewer days. CWWs are not new (Barton-Cunningham 1981, 1982), and certainly are an area with substantial research interest, especially in terms of improving the work-life balance of employees (c.f. Bambra et al. 2009). Compressing the number of hours worked in a week to fewer days is a means with which organisations have attempted to experiment in their production/service capacities. The majority of research on CWWs indicates positive effects on the WLB balance of the workers involved, particularly, the reduction of job-related stress and fatigue (e.g., Pierce and Dunham 1992; Freer and Murphy-Black 1995; Vega and Gilbert 2001; Townsend et al. 2003), although there are some studies reporting worsening WLB results (Todd et a11993; Campolo et al. 1998). The purpose of this study is to understand better the way employees perceive their WLB and make use of their altered recreation time patterns once they have shifted to a CWW. The examination of the change to long work hours over a shorter working week provides a novel way to examine changes to work-life balance without a reduction in working hours per week. The contribution of this study to existing literature is the focus on the impact of increased recreation time over a full weekend and the way in which this can be achieved through workplace initiatives.

Policy and Regulation of Working Time

The prevalence of a long work hours culture within Australia has been attributed to the nation's weak working time regulation which contributes to extended working time for many employees (Peetz et al. 2003; Van Wanrooy and Wilson 2006). Compared to other European countries such as France, Australia has few institutional working limits to long working hours (Campbell 2002).

Unions have long been involved in efforts to reduce long working hours...