Get a life before it's too late

The construction industry is notoriously demanding of its workforce. Hours are long and constant cost and time pressures create stressful working conditions that make it difficult to strike a work-life balance. As a result, anyone who has ever worked in the construction industry will not be surprised by the finding of researchers in Australia who report that construction professionals experience significantly higher levels of job burn-out than other occupational groups in international studies, including comparative samples of technologists, managers and even military personnel.

The Australian research was prompted by a question posed by one senior manager in an Australian construction firm. After walking around the company offices, the manager, a man with more that 40 years of experience in the industry, asked: "why do all of our young project engineers and managers look burnt out?" This question sparked a three-year research project, sponsored by the Construction Industry Institute (Australia).

Burn-out is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, cynicism and a sense of diminished personal accomplishment. The burn-out phenomenon is a cause for concern because it is consistently associated with mental and physical health problems, unhealthy behaviours and lifestyle choices such as substance abuse and alcoholism, job dissatisfaction, absenteeism and excessive staff turnover.

From the perspectives of both employee health and organisational effectiveness, the construction industry needs to wake up to the problem of burn-out.

Early research regarded burn-out as something caused exclusively by people's experiences at work. However, more recently, burn-out has been acknowledged as arising from exposure to stressful conditions both at work and outside of work. This new understanding suggests that burn-out might be closely related to employees' work-life balance.

Work-life balance is an inclusive term that recognises that people are involved in many activities outside work, such as sporting activities and community work. However, work and family are arguably the two most important life domains occupied by most adults. Where work demands excessive involvement, as can be the case in the construction industry, the potential for conflict between work and family life is high. Research consistently shows that when people experience conflict between work and family life, this conflict leads to adverse outcomes, including burn-out.

Overworked

Site-based construction workers typically work a six-day week and, during peak times, site-based professional and managerial employees are often required to perform significant amounts of unpaid overtime. Given the long hours of work required, it is not surprising that work-family conflict is a common problem among site-based construction personnel. Indeed, the Australian research revealed that the site-based employees of one large construction organisation experienced significantly higher levels of work-to-family conflict and job burn-out than the same company's employees who worked at headquarters or a regional office.

The Australian research also revealed that work-family conflict plays an important role in the development of job burn-out among construction personnel. Although job demands, such as workload, responsibility and work hours correlated significantly with people's experience of burn-out, this relationship was an indirect one, occurring through employees' experience of work-family conflict. That is, job demands were directly related to employees' belief that their work interfered with their family life in a negative way and, in turn, this belief gave rise to burn-out. These findings highlight the importance of helping employees in the sector to achieve a balance between their work and non-work lives.

Simply put, the practical implication of this finding is that, to prevent job burn-out, construction organisations would be wise to examine ways to improve employees' work-life balance and to reduce the harm caused by work-family conflict.

The Australian researchers examined the role of a supportive work environment in mitigating the effects of work-family conflict, revealing that where employees receive practical support from co-workers and supervisors, the relationship between work-family conflict and burn-out is substantially weakened.

In other words, when employees feel that others in their work environment are supportive of their work-life balance, work-family conflict is much less likely to give rise to burn-out. However, it is vital that this support is demonstrated in a practical way - for example, by agreeing to swap shifts or provide flexibility to attend to family matters. Simply listening to a co-worker or subordinate's work-life balance difficulties without offering any practical assistance is likely to lead to cynicism.

Compressed working

The Australian research is ongoing, with the recent award of a £100,000 grant by the Australian Research Council. The grant is funding research into management strategies designed to improve employees' work-life balance, implementing and evaluating them in a series of case study construction projects with member companies of the Construction Industry Institute (Australia). These strategies will focus on providing employees with alternative work schedules and enhanced flexibility and control over their work arrangements.

In the first of these case study projects, a compressed work week was introduced. This involved increasing the number of hours worked per day over a five-day week and eliminating weekend work. The compressed work week was introduced alongside other management strategies aimed at encouraging employees to maintain a healthy diet, exercise regularly and manage their time better so they could work more efficiently and productively. The evaluation revealed that the workforce overwhelmingly supported these measures and the case study project was completed six months ahead of schedule and under-budget.

The Australian research suggests that organisations and individuals have much to gain by implementing measures to support employees' work-life balance. In the words of one employee in the first case study project: "I was actually contemplating whether the construction industry was for me, and I was becoming active in seeking other roles. But the elimination of the Saturday work really saved me from that. If it hadn't been for that, I probably wouldn't be here at the moment. Not only have I felt the change and the huge benefit, but my wife has as well. She immediately saw a totally different person at weekends, so that was really positive. Now I am much happier, much more energetic at work, so I concentrate for longer - well, for the entire time I am here - whereas before there were times that were non-productive."

Work cultures in the construction industry will not change overnight but the recognition that work-life balance is good for business as well as people is surely a good starting point. 

• Dr Helen Lingard is associate professor at the School of Property, Construction and Project Management at RMIT University, Australia. She would like to thank Leighton Contractors, Baulderstone Hornibrook and the Department of Main Roads (Queensland) for their support in this research, the results of which first appeared in the September 2005 edition of the journal Construction Management and Economics.