Work Life Balance 3 - The Big Overview

From an interview I did with RecruitIreland.com

There is a lot of talk about Work-Life Balance in the media. What is Work-Life balance?
It is exactly what it says on the tin. In these competitive times, employers, whether in public service or the private sector, are happy to take everything you are willing to give them. That is fine when long hours and stressful conditions are the exception, but it is a real problem when they become the norm. Face it, if you step under a truck tomorrow, you are not going to be remembered for your brilliant advertising campaign, for getting the accounts processed on time every month or increasing your company’s market share. The people who will miss you and remember you are the people outside of work. So, if you are not striking a healthy balance between your personal life and your working life, you are missing the point!

All too often we don’t question our values or attitudes, we don’t re-frame our thinking, we don’t take constructive action on a stressor, until a significant life event forces us to do so. I have lost count of the number of clients who have said, “What’s it all about?” following a serious illness or the loss of a loved one. I think that one of the reasons why the concept of balance comes up so much nowadays is because employees and jobseekers have finally accepted that job security is an extinct concept. As such, there is a very real, (sometimes spoken, more often unspoken) pressure to be seen to be a good corporate citizen, to be a high achiever against your performance standards, to go that extra mile …

Now, I'm not some one-with-the-universe type here - I have a strong commerical-industrial background and I work in that environment every day. I am a pragmatist and a realist and I accept that bucking against a system that subtly and constantly makes these demands of you is not easy; but again I ask, what is the point of life? Of your life? Is it just about putting bread on the table and servicing your bills, or is it a little more than that? Defining these things is rarely easy, hence the need for a managed career plan.

How do I work to achieve balance for myself?
You will find this very difficult to do unless you are working to some kind of plan and assertively sticking to it. Most people can tell you what they are going to be doing on Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day, etc. every year. Why can’t we do this on a day-to-day basis? For most of us, it’s because we are reacting, firefighting the myriad demands that are made of us every day.

Take a week. Draw it on a piece of paper and divide it out into a grid of 7 X 24. You can account for quite a lot of that time – sleep, commuting, job, domestic activities. Look at what’s left. What if you were to block out Thursday evening to take your partner out for a swim, a massage and a cheap & cheerful meal? How good would that be for both of you? How hard would you both work to not give that time away? We all do this for important annual events; the items listed above, birthdays, annual leave, weddings, school plays, and so forth. Why don’t we do it on a weekly basis? What about blocking out 2 hours on a Tuesday evening for a long bath with a good book and a couple of glasses of wine? Go whole hog and have candles and incense. Take this concept down to a daily basis. Would blocking out 25 minutes to go for a stroll at lunchtime with your mobile phone turned off be a good idea?

It’s a question of taking yourself and your needs seriously. That Tuesday evening bath gets deferred because your mother calls and wants to moan about Auntie Mabel for an hour. You have placed too low a priority, too low a value, on that bath. Turn the phone off. Get your partner to intercept your calls. Make a plan. Take control. I am not suggesting that you rigidly adhere to some cast-in-stone schedule - you will inevitably have to adjust. But without a plan you are merely following the path of least resistance and that rarely makes for a good balance for you. You will adopt other people’s urgencies and trail along with their agenda instead of driving your own. (The 3 most aggressive words in the English language? "Ah go on.") A good way of looking at this is to plan out the schedule - colour code it or whatever - and then compare what actually happened with what you wanted to happen in terms of time usage. If you are not happy with the actual, examine why you felt you had to adjust away from the plan and see if there is anything you can learn from that. Play these simple games and you will be well on your way to achieving equilibrium. [I wrote about this in more detail here]

If I want a flexible work arrangement, how do I initiate that discussion with my manager?
Like any good consultant, I answer most questions with the phrase “It depends.” It depends on how flexible you need the arrangement to be, how flexible/inflexible the manager and the company are and very importantly, how vital you are to the smooth running of the company. (Bono has managed to build a lot of flexibility into his U2 schedule, but then, he is a pretty integral part of that company now, isn’t he?) The old adage tells us not to be indispensable, because if we are, we can’t be promoted. The same holds true for flexible working arrangements.

I would recommend either a bald discussion, talking from a position of strength; or a drip-feed strategy, where the concept is gradually introduced and enabled/facilitated. Unless you are Bono, you will need to focus a great deal of the discussion on benefits to the company - and if you can’t talk concretely about benefits, then you will need to at least couch the discussion in terms where the manager won’t be feeling that the company is working for your good rather than the other way around.

How can I take advantage of flexibility without my career suffering? What are the options?
Depends [ ! ] on you and your particular employer, but I would say at the outset that I don’t have too many happy case studies of continued advancement while working flexibly in a way that suits the employee. By asking for flexible working arrangements, you are having the temerity to suggest that the company does not own you body, soul, mind and spirit. Some companies get a little peevish at this - or downright aggrieved. If you are already on the top of the heap, this is less of a problem, but if you are trying to achieve that balance as you ascend the ladder, it will be a very rare organisation indeed that takes you as seriously as the wage-slave who regularly puts in 70-hour weeks.

Many companies have conveniently forgotten that the job-for-life covenant has been consigned to the history books and still expect you to behave with undying and unquestioning loyalty to the organisation. Pick up your newspaper any day and you can see that this is not a quid pro quo. The level of job loss as a result of restructuring, downsizing, closures, mergers & acquisitions, re-engineering and profit calls continues to grow. Don’t kid yourself, the vast majority of companies have little or no loyalty to their staff and yet they have the gall to demand loyalty from you? That’s a hard double standard for anyone to live up to.

What are the benefits of work-life balance for me and my employer?
For you, as long as you are not suffering financially, the benefits are self-evident. Employers tend to be slower to see the advantages of these kinds of working practices. I would sum up the benefit to the employer in one word - productivity. Happy, less-stressed employees who are grateful to their employer for working around their needs in this way are going to be far more productive, conscientious and loyal than disgruntled stress puppies. There are lots of studies which demonstrate this, yet employers are very slow to change. Remember Ron Livingston's great speech in Office Space?

"It's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I don't care. If I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime. So where's the motivation? Plus I have eight different bosses right now. Eight. Which means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation - not to be hassled. That and the fear of losing my job, but you know what? That'll only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."

All too common. It's a chicken-egg dilemma - does the individual have this attitude built-in and somehow slip under the radar during the selection process, or does the lack of balance in the modern workplace engender this attitude in the individual over time?

How important is Work-Life balance becoming in companies' Recruitment Policies?
I see a polarisation on this - they either care about it a whole lot or not at all. This is why it is essential, in your career management efforts, that you develop a thriving network providing you with information and conduct strong research on any organisation that you are considering joining.

Are employers really embracing this or is it just lip service?
Honestly? Mostly lip service. The boardroom conversations that I am hearing on this either think that ‘the balance thing’ is a bit of a fad, or simply a useful way of weeding out employees who are less than fully committed. What’s interesting to me is that most of the people who are having those conversations are white, middle-aged, golf-playing, rugby-watching men. The organisations who listen to their customer base, who listen to their employees and who have the best chance of surviving in these increasingly uncertain times have a higher proportion of women in the upper echelons. This is why I advocate a visit to the Companies Registration Office to assess the make-up of the Board for companies you are applying to. Knowledge is power and the more you know about the philosophy, culture and reality of working in the company you are thinking of joining, the better.

What are the consequences of living in imbalance?
The derivative of the word ‘stress’ is a Middle English word connoting pressure exerted on a person for the purposes of compulsion. The derivative of the word ‘worry’ is the Old English word wyrgan which means to strangle. Lovely!

You will almost certainly not float through life without having to face and survive a bunch of crises. Elderly relatives will die. Children will have accidents or horrendous illnesses. Friends and colleagues will stab you in the back. Businesses you are involved in will fail. You will lose jobs or make poor career choices. You will have debts. You will crash cars. Lumps will fall off your house. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. There’s a whole lot of stuff in your life over which you have little or no control. My point is this: if you have control in a situation, any control, USE IT.

Very few of us are working to a plan - studies show that about 3% of the population map out their professional lives in a strategic way. Those same studies consistently demonstrate that these ‘planners’ win. They know where they are going and what they have to do to get there and so, at any given time, they know where they are in life. The rest of us find something that we have a modicum of talent in or a scholastic aptitude for and plod away, hoping for the best. You would never take a journey in your car without a clear destination in mind - you would just end up panicking when you arrived at the first junction and didn’t know which way to turn. And yet many people take exactly that approach to their working lives. And they wonder why they are stressed and can’t find a balance in their lives?

Related Posts:
Radio interview on Work Life Balance - Part 1, Part 2
Placing value on your time
Jessica Hagy's wonderful take on the topic