The second problem is that many organisations - and work/ life campaigners - have been too narrowly focused on time away from the job as the way to relieve pressure and achieve a sense of balance, when it is at least as important to make time at the job more productive and rewarding. As Professor Theodore Zeldin, the Oxford university historian, philosopher and management expert, has argued: 'The jobs that exist today don't correspond to the kind of humans we've become.' He argues for making jobs so engaging that the lines between work and leisure become blurred.

David Hicks, a 35-year-old freelance consultant in the retail, leisure and media industries, is one of a new breed of managers who agree strongly with Professor Zeldin and are prepared to be radically active in recreating their working lives. 'After 13 years in corporate life [as a marketing director], I came up against a serious values clash.' His own core values - of creativity and innovation - weren't being met in his job, 'but I didn't know of any other job where they could be met. So I decided to employ myself.'

As a freelance, he chooses the projects he takes on and when and where he works. He leaves himself more time for his private passions of photography (he exhibits and sells his work) and teaching kids to windsurf. He elaborates: 'You need confidence to work this way, but increasingly we work longer and harder, and work has to be about more than just money. Work expresses us as people. If they want us to work this hard, it has to be worth it.'

This desire for work to be more meaningful and personally rewarding appears to be spreading. Asked to choose from a menu of options for 'new ways of working', our managers voted overwhelmingly for more speed, transparency and flexibility. More than half chose faster decisionmaking as their first preference for new ways of working. In second place was moreess, suggesting that the management trend towards adult/adult relationships that replaced old-style paternalism has a way to go; and, in third place, they would like to work in smaller teams of fewer but better people. Only after these choices did flexible working make the list, demonstrating that it is still important, but it is by no means the priority - or the panacea - we might have thought.

Another reason for this may lie in a growing sense of autonomy at work. Most managers already have flexibility there - working from home on odd days, leaving early for Sports Day without special dispensation - and don't consider it a perk so much as a gradual mind-shift. Our first survey portrayed a stressed-out workforce that largely felt stuck with their unbalanced lives. Today, there are real signs that managers are taking personal responsibility for their work/life balance, and attitudes are changing.