Will work-life balance upset IT?

IT managers might feel little connection with the human resources issues that preoccupy so many business leaders, but it would pay to pay attention

To the prestigious Henley Management College to hear Robert Taylor, who used to write about labour issues for the Financial Times. Taylor has recently been researching the myths and realities of the UK’s world of work, for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Much of the ESRC’s effort concerns the work-life balance. In April it will report on the trend for “partnership” at work. In June it will hold an international conference to compare British management and labour relations with those in the US, France, Germany, Sweden and Australia. Are IT directors tracking this stuff? No – but they ought to be.

Labour issues may have become HR issues, but they still form the most important and most neglected organising framework for enterprise IT. Not only are employee satisfaction levels way down, managers are fed up too – especially with long hours. Airport bookshops groan with the leadership examples set by Rudi Giuliani, Jack Welch and Sven-Goran Eriksson. Meanwhile, IT is often seen as part of the problem with work, not part of the solution.

That isn’t right, yet Taylor and the ESRC’s exposure of some of the trendy but unfulfilled visions of today’s workplace is valuable to people in IT. Take the myth of “delayered” management. Over the past three years, there has been a 40 percent increase in part-time managers in the public sector. But there, as well as in construction, wholesaleing, retailing and financial services, the demand for full-time managers has actually rocketed. There is in fact less agency work and subcontracting of labour – or of IT. In an ESRC survey of 2,000 HR managers, 71 percent did not contract out security. Only 22 percent farmed out payroll; 60 percent did their own employee training; and a full 75 percent owned their own IT. Indeed, 84 percent of those surveyed said they had no plans for outsourcing.

Moral: hold on to and improve your own people. More than a quarter of the ESRC sample complained that their turnover of staff was up.

For IT as for HR, space has also become an issue. With the market for commercial property relatively buoyant, nearly a quarter of sampled firms had taken measures with their IT and related equipment to increase the amount of space available to them. More than a third had reorganised both space and equipment over the past three years. Hot-desking is up – perhaps faster than teleworking.

IT usage has some glaring gaps. About 70 percent of firms do not use IT at the point of sale, more than 60 percent do not use it for stock-taking, and at best a half use it to manage working time, handle employee information or assess employee performance. Yet in all sectors, more than 40 percent of HR managers say that the time spent on employment issues has risen over the past three years, and between one in 20 and one in eight say that they have had to go to an employment tribunal in the past 12 months.

I suspect that IT managers closely follow general managers in not being very good at “labour issues”. The UK’s shift to EU-style regulation, “partnership” and employee communications will not make things better. But IT people had better prepare for it all the same.