The international media has had a field day covering the Spanish prime minister’s announcement, in early April, that he wants to return Spain to GMT and bring the country’s working hours and practices in line with the rest of Europe. Some newspapers in Britain and the United States even went so far as to interpret Mariano Rajoy’s comments as a pledge to do away with Spain’s famous siesta.

The truth may be slightly less exciting for foreign journalists, but it will be a lot more meaningful to Spanish workers.

Siestas are already a thing of the past. (For example, the New York Times reported their demise 10 years ago.) Yes, there was a time when most working Spaniards took a two-hour break beginning around 2 PM, allowing them to go home for lunch, be with their family, relax, and even snatch a cat nap on the sofa.

But this is less and less the case. A typical Spanish household these days is one where both parents work full-time and where there is limited access to child care facilities, meaning grandparents often step in to help. Most people now have lengthy commutes to work, making trips back home during the day impractical. Workers also spend long hours in the office — a typical Spanish working day begins at 8:30 AM, includes a one-to-two-hour lunch break beginning around 1:30 PM, and concludes around 7 PM or 8 PM. Many Spanish workers then start the long commute home. No wonder Spain is famous for dining late.

The Spanish government is looking for new ways to encourage business leaders to change managerial attitudes to support better work-life balance. It’s less about getting rid of the already-gone siesta and more about embracing a change that many organizations are already making.

Managerial thinking around the world has undergone a subtle but important shift in recent years about work-life issues. It is now increasingly recognized that unless organizations provide support and flexibility, employees find it difficult to fulfill their family and work responsibilities. This line of thinking represents a significant shift, from viewing work-life issues as private concerns to recognizing that managers play a critical role.

The boss’s influence

A mounting body of research shows just how much influence managers have. For example, in 2015, with the support of the European Union, a number of Spanish regional governments conducted a survey to evaluate the extent to which companies allowed employees to work from home (one of the more common and popular work-life balance perks). As part of the survey, I conducted a study with my research team to explore the top leaders’ influence over telecommuting policies. This study will be published soon in Leadership & Organizational Development Journal. A sample of 2,388 middle managers reported their senior managers’ beliefs about work-family balance by answering questions on a sliding scale about the extent to which important decision makers

Seemed convinced of family-friendly HR practices’ value to employees

Balanced work and family life

Felt a personal commitment to implementing family-friendly practices

The middle managers also reported on their firm’s provision of teleworking facilities as well as organizational characteristics such as industry, multinational status, and firm size.

Our findings showed that firms are more likely to provide telework facilities when senior managers show their support for work-family balance, even after controlling for industry, geographical dispersion, and size. In other words, senior business leaders are critical catalysts for successfully implementing alternative work time arrangements.

Everybody wins

Managers have a clear influence over whether their employees can find work-life balance, but additional research shows work-life balance can benefit the firm as a whole, too.

For example, in a different study, my team and I found that employees and companies can both benefit from alternative ways of using time. We analyzed multisource data from 70 companies and 3,262 employees to explore the relationship between working time flexibility, business outcomes, and employee well-being. The preliminary results, presented at the Academy of Management Conference in 2015, showed that work-life support policies give employees a sense of control over their work time, which in turn improves their reported work-life balance as well as financial indicators of firm performance.

So the Spanish premier’s proposal to end the working day by 6 PM is not about leaving the siesta behind — something that happened a long time ago. It is about ending the work day at a reasonable hour and giving employees more control over when they go home.

Making better use of our time in the office, and encouraging business leaders to be more responsive to alternative work-time arrangements, will improve not only employees’ work-life balance but also corporate competitiveness in the long run.