‘Workable work’: everyone thinks it is important, but Flemish employees struggle more than ever with their work-life balance. The increase is entirely among women, mainly due to ‘the second shift’.
First the good news: working has become a bit more workable for Flemish people. This is evident from a four-yearly survey by the Social-Economic Council of Flanders (SERV), which assesses work stress, learning opportunities, motivation and conflicts between work and private life. These do not so much determine how we start a job, but how we stay at work.
After a low point in 2019, there are fewer Flemish employees experiencing a ‘bottleneck’ in one of the four domains. Complaints about work stress remain at a high level, with more than a third suffering from it. And there’s something else: we’re struggling more than ever – or at least since the measurement was launched in 2004 – with our work-life balance. One in eight Flemish employees experiences conflicts here.
The increase has been slight, but persistent since 2010, and all the more striking because no word in the workplace has been trending for as long as that damned balance between work and everything that floats around it. Hadn’t the corona crisis taught us important lessons in that area?
In an earlier interview was management professor Frederik Anseel (University of New South Wales) has previously stated: ‘The working day is longer than ever.’ You see that too Lode Godderis, CEO of disease prevention service Idewe. A kind of Bol.com mentality has descended on our professional use of ‘asynchronous communication’, such as e-mails or WhatsApp messages.
“We are more impatient, and this can put a lot of pressure on colleagues to always be available,” says Godderis. Attempts have already been made to relieve this pressure through a ‘right to disconnect’, which has been in force since April 1. Little can be said about the effect of this, given that the SERV survey took place in the spring of 2023.
At the same time, Godderis points out the trend towards more and more dual-income couples. ‘This reduces the buffer on the home front for couples, for example to care for children or parents.’ The fact that many employers are once again reducing the options for working from home may put further pressure on the balance sheet for a group of employees.
Take a step back
In this sense it is very striking: the share of male employees experiencing conflict between work and private life has remained unchanged in the SERV figures compared to 2004. The increase over the last two decades can be entirely attributed to female employees.
There is a caveat to this, says SERV researcher Ria Bourdeaud’hui. Major feminization is taking place especially in the education sector, which scores particularly poorly in terms of work-life balance. She suspects that the emergence of Smartschool – the online platform for teachers, parents and students – gives teachers a feeling of ‘constant accessibility’.
‘Apart from this shift in the labor market, the female component in that deteriorated balance remains intact. The most obvious explanation for this lies in the so-called ‘second shift’, says Bieke Purnelle from knowledge center RoSa vzw. ‘It remains relatively accepted that women take on more responsibility in the household.’
Even within (heterosexual) couples where household tasks are well divided, Purnelle sees that the mental burden lies mainly with the woman. It is she who plans birthday parties, orders shoes for the children or arranges an appointment for a parent-in-law with the neurologist.
Keeping all those balls in the air and at the same time showing ambition in the workplace can be ‘very tough and tiring’, says Purnelle. Taking a step back and working part-time – which women do more often – is often no guarantee of better mental well-being, research shows. Expectations at home then rise sharply, while those at work hardly decrease.
Tough gender roles
These tough gender roles are extremely topical, says Godderis, referring to the crisis in childcare. ‘That causes a lot of uncertainty among young parents.’ There is a lot of unpredictability in that sector, which makes it difficult for parents to know in time when they can or cannot count on childcare. If a solution has to be found, the consequences are more likely to affect women.
The SERV figures clearly show that another worrying increase is hitting women harder. Among men, the share of employees with burnout symptoms has increased from 10 to 11.5 percent since 2004, and among women it went from 10.6 to 14.9 percent.
Does the inability to say ‘no’ also affect women’s work-life balance? “It is true that women are worse at setting boundaries,” says Purnelle, who, however, thinks this is a dangerous line of thinking. ‘Women who resolutely say ‘not right now’ are quickly pushed into the box of ‘bitch’. They learn this from an early age, so you can’t suddenly say that they should be a little more assertive during their career.’
For her, the whole story starts with a working culture that takes into account the different roles a person takes on: employee, but also parent, informal caregiver or person tout court. Not a workplace where you have to beg to go home early because your child has a fever, but an employer who proactively adjusts the policy accordingly. “We still pay far too little attention to the importance of this in order to continue working,” says Purnelle. ‘And that takes its toll on women in particular.’