How do you attract job applicants from a wider pool? How do you retain staff? How do you increase productivity and ratchet up motivation? What one solution could also reduce overtime payments and poor time-keeping, extend the hours of cover for particular jobs and enable organisations to give improved service to customers?

"Work-life balance, stupid" to coin a phrase, with apologies to a US presidential campaign motto: "The economy, stupid."

According to the Equality Authority, not only could worklife balance bring all the benefits described, it could also lead to less stressed workers who feel more positive about their work.

The authority's recent report Investing in People has two subheadings - Family-Friendly Work Arrangements in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and Work-Life Balance in the new Millennium.

The ugly and dated phrase "family-friendly work arrangements" is a minor quibble in an otherwise timely Irish report on work-life balance. It's a regrettable choice of language because everybody needs a healthy work-life balance, not just workers with children.

One of the problems with the "family-friendly" tag is that work-life balance tends to be perceived as a women's issue only, rather than for men and women alike. And work-life balance is as important for single people as for couples with children.

More crucially still, work-life balance policies, properly understood and implemented, permeate the whole ethos of an organisation, from its mission statement, through all its core policies and impact equally upon senior management and the factory floor.

By contrast, "family-friendly arrangements" are initiatives that, however welcome, have not the same force to reshape organisational values at their core.

The Equality Authority, whose function it is to promote equality and combat discrimination on the grounds of gender, family status, disability, age, race, religion, sexual orientation and membership of the Traveller community, has identified worklife balance and family-friendly work arrangements as priority issues.

Work-life balance initiatives proposed by the report include:

part-time work, where the hours of work are arranged to suit both the employer and the employee;

flexible or personalised hours, to enable workers to adjust or personalise their working time;

job-sharing, enabling two employees to share one full-time position, dividing equally the duties and responsibilities of the job, perhaps splitting the working day or the week;

a compressed working week, whereby the employee works the full number of hours in a reduced number of days a week, such as a 38-hour week comprising four days working 9 1/2 hours a day;

flexitime, providing the worker with flexible starting and finishing times. The authority says: "There are core times when all employees must be present. The flexible times are those periods during which the employee's starting and finishing times may be varied, subject to the demands of the job. Typically, starting times may range from between 8 a.m. and 9.30 a.m. and finishing times between 4 p.m. and 5.30 p.m.

"The core times when employees have to be in the workplace are normally from 9.30 a.m. to noon and between 2 p.m. and 4 or 4.30 p.m."

teleworking, working using information and communication technologies independent of location, an increasingly popular way of working, with an estimated 61,000 people in Ireland already working off-site

annualised hours, whereby a part-time or full-time employee works a set number of hours over a year, with the hours arranged to suit employer and worker.

Other arrangements include emergency and special leave, term-time working, voluntary reduced time, career breaks and phased retirement. The report found that while 53 per cent of companies in the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector operate one or more family-freindly work arrangements, "the overall number of employees availing of such arrangements is small".

It found that the potential business benefits of work-life balance are "not apparent to many employers" and that there is "evidence of varying degrees of employer resistance" to it.

Contrary to the work-life philosophy which envisages work-life balance permeating every aspect of an organisation's life, the report found that most employers believe such arrangements should be provided for employees on an ad hoc and case-by-case basis. Proof maybe that many employers would appear to miss the big picture about work-life balance.

Equality Authority Lo Call: 1890 245545 Website: www.equality.ie

jmarms@irish-times.ie