What must planners do differently?

Work-life balance: Planning in a stressed-out society

Convincing evidence that UK employees are working harder and longer exists across all sectors of the UK labour market. This ‘overwork culture’ comes at a steep cost: UK workers lost 12.8 million days to stress-related absence in 2019, with public service industries particularly hard-hit.

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is increasingly difficult – competitive pressures (often austerity-linked) in both the public and private sectors urge employees to do more with less, while ICT advances at home and in the office enable people to extend their availability and work hard more easily.

The rise of working at home during the Covid pandemic has raised our consciousness of these issues. Yet, while an intense, long-hours work schedule is often framed as a lifestyle option that some find appealing, such ‘choice’ is illusory in organisations where there are fewer people and more to be accomplished.

Although there is strikingly little research on this, from our work it is clear that planning is no exception to this trend. Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) are weathering austerity by becoming lean and commercialised; staff cuts and churn are endemic while rapid policy change and proceduralism generate increased workloads.

Fat-cutting exercises in LPAs have negative implications for staff wellbeing, particularly in contexts where development pressure remains high. Meanwhile, private sector practitioners are far from immune to the dynamics of overwork, operating in an increasingly competitive environment where an always-on work culture is often celebrated and rewarded.

The result is deteriorating working conditions where overwork has become business-as-usual. Frequent policy reforms require continuous re-learning and re-jigging of work processes, while an increased focus on targets and box-ticking inflates paperwork and closes down headspace. In lean teams, staff sickness is borne by colleagues who are already overloaded, leading to a vicious cycle of overwork and burnout. There are new emotional demands that fuel this cycle: planners must cope with high-volume, social media-fuelled public objections, navigate their professional identity in a hostile neoliberal political climate, and manage the dissonance between their (idealistic) planning education and a Machiavellian reality where developers are supremely powerful and the client is always right.

Weakened contracts and diminished union solidarity further threaten public sector planners’ work-life balance. As LPAs shift to a ‘portfolio’ staffing model comprising permanent, seconded and agency staff, the protections and privileges that public sector workers have traditionally enjoyed are often absent or diminished. In outsourced regimes, TUPEd workers maintain their flexitime while newer recruits get a weaker deal. Despite this, for some planners, opportunities for work-life balance in the public sector remain more attractive than the higher rewards available in the private sector.

The private sector, by contrast, offers attractive benefits packages that include private healthcare (made even more appealing by a wider structural context where the NHS is crumbling) and wellness perks. Strong corporate cultures can be highly nurturing but, in an increasingly competitive climate, are also an incubator for overwork and presenteeism. Work intensification and instability in the public sector means that consultants who do work for local authorities are often working to tighter deadlines and budgets, while needing to perform with extreme agility. At the same time, changes in the sector, such as the tendency towards large, multi-player projects, demand rapid upskilling, creating new levels of work intensity and stress.

Both sectors suffer from a culture where overwork becomes normalised (in the private sector this is often coupled with a play-hard culture that is equally demanding), where planners eat lunch at their (hot)desks and still never seem to get through the work that needs to be done. It is important that we ask questions about the effects of this, both on planners’ work-life balance and on their ability to work in the wider public interest.

Key questions

Challenging overwork culture and nurturing work-life balance is a political and societal issue that transcends planning. Within the profession, in both the public and private sectors, the overall trajectory is one of declining work life balance. What might be done to reverse this trend and why does it matter?