Arts organisations are often schizophrenic about hours of work. On the one hand, there will be the unionised part of the workforce (musicians, dancers, actor, ushers, guides) and on the other, the mainly white collar workers with individual contracts. The work hours of the unionised people will be measured down to the quarter hour with overtime payments and penalty rates. The workers in the marketing or finance sections of the organisation may have a contract that says 38 hours a week but a work culture that expects somewhat more. Un-unionised artists such as directors and designers will usually be paid a flat fee and may work at a ridiculously low hourly rate although if the show is a success or tours and they have a royalty payment based on box office built into their contract, all those long hours may be well rewarded. And of course, managers are expected to work all the hours required to get the job done, usually in exchange for a higher salary than others in the company.
The challenge is to get the balance right: to ensure that although no-one is going to be happy for their arts salary, that the hours they work are not so excessive as to cause health and safety issues. What has to be avoided is what’s described by a theatre director in Quigg’s book on Bullying in the Arts: “…there can be a sense that normal rules do not apply, probably engendered by the sense that it is hard to get work in the arts, and that we are very lucky to do something we love, so a sense of perspective in terms of work-life balance, health and safety, pay for work, doesn’t seem to apply?”
If, for example, there are regular ‘extra’ hours for non-unionised staff, then pay for them or build them properly into the base salary. If there is a flexitime system, then have limits to how much people can accrue but let them/make them take the hours off regularly. If excessive amounts of overtime are being worked in a particular department, it will probably be cheaper to temporarily or permanently employ more staff.
I have management colleagues who work 12 hours a day 6 days a week. I know others who are sending texts and emails from 6am to midnight. My approach wasn’t perfect but I did have some rules:
If I had to work long hours then I did them at work rather than at home
- I kept the mobile on at home when a show was on (in case of emergencies) but didn’t send emails or texts after hours
- When I went on holidays, I went on holidays – I either got someone in to replace me, had someone internal act in the job or delegated power to the management team to make decisions.
How do you get over the idea that you have to work longer hours than any of your subordinates? When offered a CEO role recently, a peer who didn’t want to buy into the endless hours of work yet again and said ‘no’ unless she could work less than five days a week. The Board was shocked but wanted this person enough to say ‘yes’. This person said that the shorter working week made them more effective but less consultative. But for their management team, while they were consulted less, they were empowered more with real delegated authority. An interesting outcome.
In a ‘real life’ side bar in a management text book, an executive is described thus: “[Karen Stanton’s] aim is to create a friendly environment so that people will want to come to work. She does not expect employees to work long hours, but while they are there she expects them to work hard, smart and efficiently…She works hard to create a positive culture where each staff member is valued.”
Examples are given of birthday cards and notes honouring achievements. Whilst saying thank you and recognising important moments in people’s lives is easy (and I have no idea why more managers and leaders don’t do it), I’ve never managed to resolve the work hard versus work long dilemma.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent most of my life as a leader in organisations producing product that people cared passionately about but also organisations that were under resourced. And so we relied on people’s good will and commitment over and above 37.5 hours per week. I remember as a public servant, I counted every minute and was out the door as soon as it was legal. But if I found someone counting hours in the same way in an arts or cultural organisation, I’d be asking why they wanted to be there. However, there’s a difference between counting minutes and working ridiculous hours or even expecting people to be at work at difficult times. I know this makes it hard for parents and I have and will restructure meetings and work hours to enable parents to drop off and pick up their children from day care or school. Admittedly that more flexible approach to life came when I had to pick up a child by 6pm at the absolute latest and when I had to drop a teenager off to school and then fight peak hour traffic. So we stopped having early morning or late night meetings as a regular part of operations.
It’s not just the management team that tend to work excessive hours. If they aren’t setting a good example, then most of their team will also feel the need to stay on. James Autry, writing about the Servant Leader, describes the idea that working long hours is a sign of loyalty as a myth. He made sure that he sent “clear signals that working nights and weekends was not a key to success in our group”. If someone is working excessive hours, Autry says that you need to ask two questions. What’s wrong with the person that they can’t accomplish their tasks in the time given and/or what’s wrong with the job structure that it can’t be done during regular hours? However, he’s also realistic about the organisation’s needs acknowledging that sometimes extra hours have to be worked but “[i]f someone took extra time and accomplished a special project of merit, that person would be appreciated and rewarded” .
In a newspaper article about a report on work-life balance in Australia called Walking the Tightrope, a manager from a training and consulting company gave a variety of examples to prevent people from working overtime such as phones automatically switched over to voicemail at 5pm, people being allowed to work from home, a rule that you can’t send someone an email after 5pm, emails disabled when people go on holiday so they don’t monitor it whilst they are away. In this same report, there was mention of something that had completely escaped my attention even though I regularly used the words as I wandered through the building before I went home, saying it to people who were still sitting at their desks. Apparently in 2009, The Australia Institute launched a “National Go Home on Time Day” as a light-hearted way to start a conversation with employees about the important of work-life balance.
There are elements of the arts industry where flexibility is extremely limited – performance times, number of shows a week, gallery opening hours, weekend work. But there are also work patterns where tradition and budgets drive decision making. Why, for example, did MTC have rehearsals from 10am to 6pm and also on Saturdays? Why do the days of moving a show into a theatre involve 18 hour days? It’s not just the number of hours that can be difficult but when those hours are worked. In a difficult point of tension between the needs of an arts organisation and an arts worker, a back of house technician who’d signed up for a job that involved working six nights a week had a change in family circumstances and wanted to reduce the number of nights worked. This would have meant bringing in a casual technician for one or two nights. Both the director and the stage management team were fiercely against this proposal because of the chance of mistakes that could be made by a casual worker who wasn’t in the rhythm and pattern of the show. And mistakes back stage can have a serious impact given the implicit danger of the performance space.
Although it’s hard to change working hours in the face of government legislation, union agreements, tradition and the behaviour of peer companies, sometimes it’s worth stepping back and asking why we do some things that potential impact on the well-being of the people who work with us. Many of the strategies that companies can implement to promote work-life balance are based on hours of work and where those hours are worked. Examples that could be used in arts organisations include the use of flextime, practices that provide spatial flexibility such as working at home and videoconferencing, part time and shared work but the most important strategies are ones that stop us demanding excessive hours from people and where we set a good example.
REFERENCES
Autry, J A 2001, The Servant Leader , Three Rivers Press, New York
Dalglish, P & Miller,C 2011, The leader in you: developing your leadership potential, Tilde University Press, Melbourne
Patty, A 2014 ‘Work-life balance is getting worse for Australians: new report’, Sydney Morning Herald,
Quigg, AM 2011, Bullying in the Arts, Gower, Farnam
This article is an edited extract from The A to Z of Arts Management by Ann Tonks, published by Tilde, Melbourne
