(SINGAPORE) The lights and air-conditioners are turned off at 7.30pm sharp in the Banyan Tree Gallery. This by strict order of Claire Chiang, the lady running the retail arm of spa resort operator Banyan Tree.

It's not that she is trying to save on the utilities bill for her family-controlled business - she wants her staff to get a life out of the office, not make work their life.

Ms Chiang is a member of Employer Alliance, a champion of work-life harmony. As its chairwoman, she is also its chief advocate. She has to walk the talk.

Yet talk is easy; the tough part is doing the walk - as Ms Chiang herself has found out. In both the public and private sectors, every employer you ask pays lip service to work-life balance. Few act on it.

'There are barriers to the mindset,' Ms Chiang says. 'They think it's complicated to do, they think it's very expensive, they're not sure what's the return, and they think staff will abuse it. So there are lots of issues.'

Still, she says there is a compelling business case for pushing work-life harmony at the workplace, especially at a time when bosses are facing an exodus of talent.

'There is literature to show, there are many cases that argue once you do this, you enhance satisfaction, you retain good talents,' Ms Chiang says. 'It's sustainable and enhances overall productivity and they can calculate for you the loss of every staff, what are the dollars it incurs. So if you retain staff, you are already making money for the company.'

Salaries still matter a lot, but poll after poll has shown that a better balance between time spent at work and at home is more and more what workers, especially young ones, want.

Yet despite what seems to be an overwhelming case for work-life harmony, why isn't it more widely practised?

According to Ms Chiang: 'There is still a lack of awareness, there's not enough information sharing of best cases.

'Or maybe we don't know how to bring those business cases into a sharp focus to convince SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) that this is not a cost burden, but it's an investment opportunity, to invest in people, it's about longer-term sustainability.'

Ms Chiang says she has to keep talking for the moment. Indeed, spreading the word about work-life harmony is the first strategy the Employer Alliance is adopting in advancing its cause.

The second strategy is to uncover what Ms Chiang calls 'an Asian-Pacific work ethic and work culture' - and how to accommodate it with the demand for work-life balance - in forums with chief executives, human resource managers and work-life experts.

The next logical move is to provide the training to use the tools, but that's a tough one.

'How do I get the training going when we do not yet have that industry that's matured with work-life practitioners?' Ms Chiang asks. According to her, only two polytechnics here offer some semblance of a work-life module for students.

'So while we tell companies to embrace this, we now discover there is a skills gap,' she says.

So she is pushing the universities, polytechnics and employer bodies to build up the industry. And she is enlisting international expertise to help them.

The trouble is, we are still stuck with the nine-to-five work schedule to allow for flexible arrangements to achieve work-life harmony, according to Ms Chiang.

But the pressures are building up, she points out, with workers dropping out of or failing to perform at the workplace when the increasing but conflicting demands of work and family become too much for them.

Ms Chiang notes that in the West, where such stresses have become abundantly obvious and widespread, employers are tailoring jobs and work schedules in the forms of compressed work, flexi-time, part-time, project work, telecommuting, consultancy and freelance work to meet 'individualised' work-life agenda.

She suspects that the growing divorce trend worldwide can be traced to work-life imbalance.

'Talented women forced to withdraw from the workplace (because of the demand to raise a family) are isolated on the home front; she starts to have problems with her spouse because she's standing still and he's progressing,' Ms Chiang says. 'So there's a mental distancing, an emotion gap. Then trouble starts.'

But bosses must 'integrate work and life needs in their work designs, so that they allow and encourage people to take the balancing act on their own and do their own calculus'.

The Employer Alliance is not forcing the issue. Ms Chiang concedes that some sectors and jobs just cannot adjust to meet the demand of work-life balance. Even the rest that can, not all can do it to the same degree.

'We're going to each sector, from the manufacturing plants to professional groups and then to services industry and others to explore what are the challenges in applications - and also to learn from other countries to see how they do it, and can it be done?' Ms Chiang says.