I have recently joined/been recruited to be part of a work-life balance (WLB) group. Here's what happened: they did some surveys at my place of work and the one thing that came back is that our WLB is not good. I don't think my place of work is that unusual in that most of us think we're overworked and want more time for our lives. And, as all typical corporate-type places like to do, they formed committees, and I got to be a part of one.
The first thing that's obvious about WLB is that everyone has different needs and wants. This makes companies crazy because what they want most of all is for us to all want the exact same thing. They want the easy fix. "Free soup on Tuesday!" "Yay!" The good news is that when you boil it down, most workers want more time off, a better working environment, more flexibility, and less work. The bad news is that companies don't really want to give that to them.
Being on this committee has gotten me to think about what I want. How would I get more balance? How much time off is reasonable; how much time off is crossing into slacker territory? Free coffee is nice, but should I get snotty if it's not Starbucks? What kind of perks help my WLB and which ones are just kind of nice?
If you ran a company, what would you do to give your employees WLB? Should this even be a question? Maybe it's better for a company to just lay down the law and say "suck it" to their employees. As long as people are still looking for jobs, maybe that's the better strategy.
2 comments:
There's a whole lot of history you probably shouldn't be allowed to read about this false "work" vs "life" dichotomy. But essentially, out here in the non-corporate world, there's no such thing, and it just makes me tilt my little head like a puppy dog when you folks talk this way.
It's 6:57am [at this writing], and I've been up about an hour doing work. This comment is "work", because it's writing and it's network weaving and it's about "business development", which is what I "do".
You hit the nail when you invoked corporatism's desire for standardized, simple models. Unfortunately such things are always bad for the people who start to believe them, but most all of the culture is set up to make them seem reasonable: political parties, role-playing affectations like "management" and "employee", even basic economics stuff like markets and wages.
The "balance" between "work" and "life" boils down to separating the world into "standardized predictable" work and "messy, ad hoc personal" life stuff. It's an argument that large institutions have been making for a long time that we will share our predictable reliable stuff with you (per this contract), as long as you keep your messy ad hoc junk from messing it up.
In other words: deal with life yourself.
All this to say I'm a Very Bad Candidate to talk with about work–life balance. It's all life, and we should be helping the people we work with in every way possible, without any expectation of predictable, reliable reward structures.
Maybe if we ignore those large institutions long enough, they will just go away.
Dude, get a new job... Your employee is paying lip service. That you have a committee is a sign that your managers are not managing... WLB is a managers job. Shame one them.
"I.e. a healthy organisation manages both the work the company performs and the people doing the work. Messing about with the complexity of tasks messes about with the organisation’s ability to perform. An organisation is not healthy, then, when one or more of the three systems are badly functioning. If the company is making huge profit but has high attrition, sickness or depression rates, it is succeeding to run as a business to the detriment of its staff"
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