The participants were asked about how their work influences their personal life. Their thoughts were that shift work, stress, workload and tiredness affect their social and family lives. Four of the ten workers reported they felt they had enough time off work, but the difficulty was shift work, and having time off usually on days or at times when family members and friends were at work or unavailable.
Due to shift work or doing too many shifts, workers who have young or teenage children may feel that work on weekends interferes with being able to share time with their children or help them with their homework. For workers who do not live with their children, there may be even more difficulty as they might not be able to have regular access to their children, as Robert explains:
“Work overload impacts on my life, my health just to an extent and, particularly, on accessing my sons... because if... I’m not available or if I’ve done excess hours, I’m needing the time that’s supposed to be free to recover from the... extended workload... I prefer to have a reasonable amount of stability and predictability around the hours I am working because of the situation, my living situation. That is I’m estranged from my sons... Like a lot of people, they can experience their family just by going home. I’m not in that situation. So, extended hours are a problem because supervisors see me as being
relatively free, however, this availability is done at the expense, and exclusion of my sons.”
Brad (union), on the other hand, thinks there are good and bad sides to shift work as he used to be able to take his son to school in the morning when he worked in a CRU. As many participants pointed out, a big part of their free time has to be used for resting and recovery from work and exhaustion, and therefore their free time is not necessarily spendt with their family, socialising or recreation.
Sandra’s (coordinator) observation is that disability support workers take work home and do not switch off. Kate (coordinator) agrees that work can influence people’s personal lives in terms of time, and often not being at home at night, but she argues that it is “very
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much an individual thing, depends on the person, on how they establish their boundaries between home and work.”
The research participants recognised there is a potential for workers’ personal life issues influencing their work performance. Four of the ten workers reported they have a fairly quiet personal life, so do not think it has any negative influences on their work
performance. Others stated if they had difficulties in their personal life, their work performance would probably be affected.
As some of the research participants suggest, one way to improve disability support workers’ work and personal life balance is to have good team leaders who improve rosters and monitor roster lines ensuring that workers have enough time between shifts. Tom thinks that the only way work and family life balance can be improved is through negotiation – having a team leader or a supervisor who knows the staff well and has a good rapport with them and can work out rosters that best suit people. Kate (coordinator) believes that everyone doing their share of sleep-overs, morning shifts and “crappy shifts”, makes a huge difference, but some people are happy to do lots of sleep-overs and some are happy to do morning starts for a while, but Kate points out that workers cannot do this for 20 years. Two union workers suggested that putting workers on permanent rosters would allow them to plan their week and social life and improve work and family life balance. Michael (union) suggests that if casual workers become permanent part-time workers with permanent rosters, it would benefit their work and family life balance considering that casual workers’ rosters are constantly changing.
In general, the participants thought that issues with low staffing levels needed to be addressed and that skilled and professional workers needed to be employed to take the pressure off existing workers. In addition to these, improving disability support workers’ pay would allow workers to avoid doing too many hours, and therefore would contribute to better work and family life balance. Brad (union) believes if there are more skilled,
professional people doing this work, the workload would be reasonably constant and workers would know what to expect, and teamwork would be better. Taking regular annual leave and even having access to more annual leave would have potential to not only reduce stress and burn-out, but also assist workers to better balance their work
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commitments and their personal or family lives. Some participants suggest that employers need to be as accommodating as possible in approving time off if workers ask for it.