Work Life Balance
by Liam
With the recent changes in family friendly legislation, a lot has been said lately about work life balance. Some employees agree that a good balance between work life and home life can aid productivity at work. Some activities in which employees are involved outside of work can benefit their work.
For example, I do a lot of competitive dinghy racing outside of work. Many of the skills necessary to do this are transferable and benefit my work as a Solicitor. For example, last summer I participated, along with about 50 other crews from England and Italy, in the Laser 4000 European Championships which were held on Lake Garda in Italy.
Before the event took place the first problem to be solved was getting a boat and two man crew from Peterborough to Italy. It is possible to drive, but this takes about 24 hours of non-stop travel, so in reality a good couple of days driving. Not fun. People can fly (providing they enlist the assistance of a 747), although still have to get from the airport in a foreign country, with a language barrier, to the event site about 100km away. Is there public transport from the airport? Can one hire a car? As for the boat, you can’t take a performance racing dinghy on a plane. You can’t sail one from England to Italy. Shipping has to be arranged. This involves getting the boat to a shipping agent, allowing time for them to get the boat on a big boat (of the P&O variety) and by road through France to Italy in time for the event. Accommodation is also needed for a 4 day event and pre-event familiarisation with the venue. Solving all these problems takes considerable problem solving and organisation skills. It would be somewhat embarrassing to arrive to compete and find the boat, a rather fundamental bit of kit for such an event, had not turned up.
Similarly, employment Tribunals require organisational and problem solving skills. One knows where one is at the start of the matter - with a client spitting bricks at their ex-employer (or ex-employee depending on which side one is acting) and wanting to end up with judgment in their favour at Tribunal. As a Solicitor, one has to plan how to progress the case from taking instructions to a successful resolution. What happened? What’s our statement of case/defence? What evidence is available? How can we get evidence we need from an uncooperative opponent? What witnesses will be needed? Will they want to come to court? How can we get them to court? All these matters need to be considered and planned in the same way as getting the boat and crew from England to Italy.
Having done the planning and successfully arrived at the Lake Garda (or the Tribunal) with the boat, crew, accommodation, spare kit etc. (or the Tribunal with bundles, statements and witnesses) one has to be able to think on one’s feet and adapt to new facts or unexpected information.
Lake Garda starts off as a wide lake surrounded by relatively flat terrain at the South end. Moving about 60km further north (yes lake Garda is big - takes an hour to drive from end to end) the lake becomes far narrower with steep cliffs. This creates a funnelling effect where lots of wind is forced through a narrow gap in the cliffs which makes the wind increase in strength and behave abnormally. The funnelling forces the wind to bend. In open water, wind doesn’t normally do this. In the first couple of races of the event, we had some shocking results. We hadn’t accounted for this phenomenon. There were more boats ahead of us than behind us. This was not the plan! A bit of quick thinking, analysing other boats and trial and error enabled to identify the problem, factor it in to our earlier careful planning and climb up the results, culminating with a win in the last race of the event.
Similarly, at Tribunal the unexpected can, and quite often does happen. Witnesses don’t say what one wanted, new evidence gets pulled out of a hat or the Tribunal Chairman comes at things from an unexpected angle. All these require rapid re-assessment of information and quick thinking to achieve a satisfactory outcome. Allowing employees time to have a life outside of work allows employees to develop skills that can be of benefit to employers in the workplace.
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Dare I say it? This post was facile, and could have been cut to about six short sentence.
What is it supposed to add to the knowledge of the reader?
Marcin Tustin said at June 4th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Thank you for commenting. If you would like to e-mail me a post on the subject of out of work interests assisting in work performance, we would be happy to publish it as a guest post.
Liam said at June 5th, 2007 at 8:39 am
No, I wouldn’t like to enhance your blog for free. I would like you to stick to what you’re good at: short comments on employment law and current developments in employment law.
That said, please do feel free to email me content to enhance my blog.
Marcin Tustin said at June 5th, 2007 at 12:45 pm