Address EEO Trust AGM: 'Work/Life Balance'

Address EEO Trust AGM: ‘Work/Life Balance’ Grand Hall, Parliament, Wellington 2.00pm, Wednesday, 24 November 2004

Rau rangatira maa,
tenei te mihi ki a koutou i runga i te kaupapa o te ra.
Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa.

[Distinguished guests, greetings to you gathered here for this purpose today. Greetings once, twice, three times to you all.]
Good afternoon and welcome.

Acknowledgements:
·Michael Barnett, chairman of EEO Trust board;
·Philippa Reid, chief executive of EEO Trust;
·Panellists, including winners of the EEO Trust Work and Life Awards;
·employers affiliated to the trust.

Some people might see it as the ultimate irony to have a Minister of the Crown speaking about work-life balance. It’s no secret that the work of politics has the potential to make life pretty unbalanced.

But if the labour market changes of the last 20 years have taught us anything, it is that even the most established and ingrained ways of working can change, and must change, to accommodate the different needs of the economy, and the different expectations of workers and employers.

Work-life balance is one feature of a new labour market landscape. As all of you involved with the EEO Trust well understand, any workplace initiative – be it work-life balance or recruiting older workers – can only be successful and sustainable if it has benefits for everyone in the equation. Work-life balance solutions must be about meeting the needs of both businesses and workers.

The EEO Trust and the employers who work in partnership with it remind people that good, innovative workplace practices are not a cost to business, but enable them to be more successful.
The panellists you’ll be hearing from later are all examples of productive, profitable businesses that are also doing right by the people who work in them.

Findings of the Work Life Balance Project
The Work-Life Balance Project research and consultation was completed in July and the government is now considering its response, which we will release early next year.

The consultation showed that in general, employers and employees agree that implementing work-life balance policies and practices will have a positive benefit in the workplace.
However, employers have a more positive view of how well work-life balance issues are currently being addressed in workplaces than employees do. In other words, the boss thinks they’re more understanding and doing a better job than the staff do!

The work-life balance consultation and research conducted with employers by UMR indicated that employers are keen to implement work-life balance policies that are consistent with the needs of their businesses and their employees, but feel they don’t have the tools to be able to design and implement policies that will work for them.
A number of small employers noted that barriers to implementing work-life balance policies were greater for them because of their limited financial and human resources.

The EEO Trust provides some excellent diagnostic work-life balance tools, but there is currently a significant gap in the provision of tools tailored to the specific and varied needs of New Zealand employers.

As a result of the consultation, the Department of Labour is developing a work programme that includes engaging with employers to make it easy for them to implement appropriate work-life balance policies.

I’m interested in helping employers at the sector level to develop tools that meet the needs of their specific industry. These tools can then be refined and made available to other sectors.

In practical terms, this means gathering the work-life balance tools available in New Zealand and internationally, in order to assemble a work-life balance toolkit that can be trialled in industry sectors.

This will allow international tools to be tested in the New Zealand context, and to be tailored to the needs of businesses of different sizes. Once they have been trialled, found to be effective, and refined, the tools can be made available to businesses.

All the steps in this process will be carried out in partnership with the EEO Trust and other project partners. These partnerships are vital if we are to develop tools that are easy to use and useful to employers.

Conclusion
Achieving a quality working life for every New Zealander is a balancing act. Our labour market is diverse, and workers face diverse challenges, from the cleaner who struggles to afford childcare while she works at three casual jobs, to the lawyer who never leaves the office during daylight - and might expect her staff to do the same.
As in any attempt to encourage excellence in this diverse environment, an approach to work-life balance needs to be adaptable.

In the high-skill, high-productivity labour market that New Zealand is moving towards, the elements that make up a rewarding job – whether it’s decent pay, work-life balance, or skills development – will become integral to our workplaces.

Investing to support and maintain the productivity of staff will be seen as being as important as investing in support and maintenance for computer systems or factory plant.

Employers like yourselves, who work with the EEO Trust, are at the forefront of this move.

The government looks forward to continuing to work with you to find innovative solutions, so that the sometimes conflicting advice to ‘get a life’ and ‘get a real job’ can be made more compatible for every New Zealander.

Thank you.