Engagement and Work-life Balance: What We Know and Why it Matters

Organizational leaders cannot be all things to all people, but that doesn’t seem to stop some from giving it a try.  After all, best practices abound with seemingly contradictory messages vying for leaders’ attention.  Concerned about organizational performance?  Hit the gas pedal with employee engagement tactics designed to focus your people, harness their energy, and drive productivity.  Want happier employees that stick with you for the long haul?  Then use the brake pedal strategically to facilitate work-life balance for your people; allow work to occur at off hours and in cyclical sprints that accommodate personal needs, family commitments, and the rhythms of personal life.  Wondering if your need for organizational performance AND happy employees means you are supposed to somehow step on the gas pedal and the brake at the same time?  You are not alone. 

A paper published in the September 2020 edition of Human Resource Development Review recently sought to untangle the relationship between workplace engagement and work-life balance.  For leaders feeling pressed to make progress on all fronts, and “do all the things” for their organization, the authors’ efforts to discern how employee work–life balance and work engagement impact each other provide valuable insights.  Synthesizing the work of 37 separate empirical research studies, the authors sought to identify the precursors, mediators, moderators, and mechanisms at work in the relationship between work engagement and work–life balance. 

Everyone appreciates the value of a vibrant workplace, but work engagement is much more than a feel-good atmosphere and a positive state of mind at work.   Engaged employees report feeling more fulfilled by their work.  Engaged employees have been shown to positively impact a variety of organizational outcomes including financial performance, customer loyalty, and staff performance in addition to predicting high levels of job satisfaction, retention, health, and employee wellbeing. 

However, no one truly leaves their personal lives at home when they come to work, especially now that work has been brought inside the homes of so many newly remote employees.  Covid-19 has accelerated the speed at which the boundary between personal and professional lives has been blurred.  To accelerate through the crisis and build a stronger, leaner, and more agile organization, leaders must understand how employee engagement and work-life balance impact each other to drive outcomes at the individual and organizational level.  So what do we know?   

• Work engagement is a positive, fulfilling motivational state of work-related well-being characterized by high levels of vigor (energy), dedication (psychological involvement/investment), and absorption (immersion or flow).

• Work-life balance is achieved when satisfaction at work and at home are sufficiently balanced from the individual’s point of view. It is subjective and determined individually.  Importantly, balance is continuously revised in response to career progression, family developments, and personal circumstances. 

• Work life and family life are linked through the “work-family interface” and research consistently finds that each domain influences performance in the other. 

• Work engagement and work–life balance factors reciprocally strengthen or undermine each other.  Increased engagement is associated with higher levels of reported work-life balance.  Conversely, low levels of engagement are associated with lower levels of work-life balance.

• Causal direction is unclear: sixteen out of the thirty-seven studies reviewed (40%) showed support for work-life balance playing a causal role in determining engagement while twelve (32%) studies indicated a causal relationship in the opposite direction with work engagement determining perceived work-life balance.  An additional nine studies (24%) showed no directionality at all suggesting a simultaneous reciprocal relationship. 

Regardless of causaulity, a pattern of related issues consistently appears when evaluating employee engagement and work-life balance.  While an exhaustive examination of these factors is beyond the scope of this article some of the common factors include:

• Work-related factors such as the style of the organization’s leadership, strength of communications, the cultural induction process, job design and available resources, compensation, organizational culture, colleague support, and access to knowledgeable mentoring.  Other organizational factors include policies and procedures that enable or inhibit flexible work times, work-from-anywhere capabilities, job-sharing or part-time employment flexibility, and maternal/paternal leave. 

• Employee-related factors include team orientation/identification, employee self-evaluation, demographics, family resources, personality and self-esteem, self-efficacy, role engagement, motivational drivers, and career progression framework. 

Why does it matter?

• While it is premature to draw conclusions about causality, engagement and work-life balance go hand in hand. Leaders seeking to increase organizational performance and retain employees should be prepared to immerse themselves in issues related to both work engagement and work-life balance simultaneously. 

• For millions of people, Covid has meant that the workplace has firmly inserted itself into the personal and family sphere.  With roughly 70% of workers working from home in 2020 due to the pandemic, leaders should expect the hand-in-glove relationship between employee engagement and work-life balance to intensify. 

• In addition, leaders will need heightened expertise in the work-to-family interface for the foreseeable future.  Most employees do not want to return to the office full time when Covid-19 no longer forces them to remain at home. 

• Organizational structures, policies, and procedures play a major role determining whether employees are engaged at work and happy at home.  It pays to create a supportive work–family culture where employees are positioned to do their best work and add maximum value to the organization.  It is critical that leaders understand the factors at play in order to guide their decision making and anticipate how decisions or changes in one domain are likely to affect other aspects of their organization. 

As a leader, being accountable for keeping “all the things” moving forward to drive success on multiple fronts is hard.  Untangling the relationship between engagement and work-life balance won’t reduce the effort it takes to do the work. But a clear understanding of the underlying mechanisms and relationship in play will help maximize your return on effort and better improve your organizational development work.  You can do it; guidance can help you do it better.

Let’s get to work!

References:

• Macauley (2020). Hindsight 2020: Remote Work in the Post-Covid Economy. Wendworks Company Blog.

• Macauley (2020). Mentoring and Burnout Prevention.  Wendworks Company Blog.

• Macauley (2020). No I in Team?  Think Again.  Wendworks Company Blog.

• Macauley (2020). Relationships and Meaningful Work. Wendworks Company Blog.

• Macauley (2020). Retain Employees to Thriven in the New Economy. Wendworks Company Blog.

• Owl Labs (2020). State of Remote Work Report (United States)

• Wood, Oh, Park, and Kim (2020). The Relationship Between Work Engagement and Work–Life Balance in Organizations: A Review of the Empirical Research.  Human Resource Development Review.