Midnight messages from managers, late night link-ups with London: such annoyances are becoming all too common for Australian financial services staff as work increasingly impinges on their private lives.

The recent Randstad Workmonitor report reveals that half of Australian employees handle work-related matters, including calls and emails, outside of office hours. Finance professionals are suffering more than their counterparts in most other sectors, says Jason Cartwright, banking and finance group director, Randstad.

“It’s become accepted practice that you will answer work questions when asked. It’s a global industry, and many financial services firms in Australia are large international companies, so reports and meetings aren’t always during our working day,” he adds.

The ubiquity of mobile devices means employees are constantly required to respond to requests from local and overseas offices. As The Economist’s Schumpeter column put it earlier this month: “The dratted devices also make it easier for managers in one time zone to spoil the evenings of managers in another. Employees find it ever harder to distinguish between “on-time” and “off-time” – and indeed between real work and make-work. Executives are lumbered with two overlapping workdays: a formal one full of meetings and an informal one spent trying to keep up with the torrent of emails and messages.”

You're left with less of a life when lay-offs lead to leanness

But it’s not just the twin terrors of technology and time zones that are causing work to intrude on personal life; recent redundancies in the financial sector are partly to blame. “A lot of teams are running bare bones and people are being asked to do more. Tasks that used to be shared are now done by just one person,” says Cartwright.

Retrenchments have also made those who remain feel less secure about retaining their own roles. “So people feel they have to go the extra mile to impress their managers, and that includes working long hours.”

Client-facing professionals, such as financial planners and investment bankers, typically experience high demand for their services when they are outside the workplace. Middle-office reporting roles, like risk and compliance, are also affected. Cartwright comments: “They are dealing with new regulations. And with the market is so volatile, clients are wanting more reporting data because of the uncertainty.”

Flexibility: not so formal please

Dissatisfaction about the lack of work-life balance in financial services has been mounting since the GFC. Cartwright encourages employers not to take a “tick in the box” approach and not to just offer a list of official work-life initiatives. Staff have become used to most of these policies and their effectiveness as retention tools has fallen over the past decade.

“Where I see the biggest opportunity is in ‘hidden flexibility’, which is not in the contract,” he says. “This consists of one-on-one informal arrangements between managers and employees to deal with ad hoc events. For example, ‘I’ve worked to 8pm three days this week, so I’m leaving at lunch time on Friday’.”

Informal flexibility is even being mentioned in general terms at interviews “I’m seeing a lot more of this. Employers talk about ‘flexible working environments’, ‘empowering employees’, and ‘trust’. Trust is important. If you blow it, you blow flexibility.”

The Randstad survey also states that half of Australian employees are dealing with private matters at work. “It’s a trade off. With work impinging on home life, it’s become more accepted that employees can do this. If an employee routinely responds to work matters at 9pm, he should expect a half day off if he needs to get a washing machine installed.”

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