Dr Louise Grisoni

Oxford Mail:

Associate Dean, Research, Knowledge and Exchange in the Faculty of Business, Oxford Brookes University

Work-life balance and how to achieve it is a topical issue; with more than one in 10 of the UK working population, (about 13 per cent), working 49 hours or more a week.

As organisations recover from the economic downturn, the pressures, choices and impacts on people working in organisations are likely to change and work-life balance will become a greater challenge for many.

I have been researching how poetry, or more specifically poetry workshops, can help stressed employees reflect on their experiences and voice their anxieties over work-life balance.

Poetry is a creative way of engaging with the topic and I have found that it gives people a way to express their thoughts and feelings in a way that they haven’t done or weren’t able to before.

Participants are able to acknowledge the impact work-life balance is having through poetry, which brings the full range of emotions both positive and negative to the surface, helping to resolve issues around prioritising work and family or leisure activities.

Participants find it helps point towards actions that can be taken to improve their current situation through understanding it better.

People taking part in a poetry workshop have expressed those feelings through the power of metaphor and similes which enabled them to see their issues in a new light, acknowledge their own concerns and realise their own values.

Traditional techniques to help someone achieve a better work-life balance have focused on asking people to identify how much time they allocate to different tasks or activities.

My research, which uses poetry workshops, is more holistic and creative in its approach.

People who took part in the poetry workshops, which have been organised in the UK and across Europe, included managers from a range of public sector organisations and masters’ students.

They were invited to create collective poems. In groups, participants write one line, then keywords, and these words act as prompts to the next person who writes a line and passes the poem on until it has gone around the whole group.

The result is a collective poem representing the thoughts and feelings of the whole group. People can then discover their own poem from the collective ones.

Another approach we explored was using haiku – a form of three line poetry – to enable those taking part to say in very concise form how they are impacted by work-life balance.

The following is an example of a verse from a group poem created in one recent poetry workshop: Work-life balance: An ideal to aspire to The ideal slips away as the turmoil rages The turmoil of the 25-hour day Never a fulfilled day: never enough Never, never a question I ask myself whenever I don’t achieve it Wherever, whenever, life to the full This study is ongoing and has already highlighted a number of key points. I find that people can be initially quite anxious about writing poetry because it tends to be regarded as a “highbrow” activity.

Working with poetry also requires different skills to those that many managers have developed and perfected in daily practice by drawing much more on right-brained activity.

In addition, it does enable them to depart from traditional ways of thinking and encourages them to be creative, try something different and perhaps to “say the unsayable”.

I also found that people came away from the workshops feeling more in control of their lives, with better understanding of how they allocate their time between work, family and hobbies and how pressures experienced in each area shift and change in relation to each other.

It is not a form of therapy, nor is it about creating beautifully crafted poetry. It’s about seeing things differently and thinking differently.