Work-Life Balance: Finding the Balance

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Let’s be honest, for most of us, work is not easy and finding some kind of a balance between our job, our life, and our family is difficult to say the least. Our jobs often seem to take increasing amounts of our limited waking hours. As organizations have struggled to remain competitive during the most recent downturn, many workers have found themselves taking on additional duties. If the job was not demanding enough, our commutes have gotten longer, traffic is heavier, and from every direction, our attention is being demanded. A former boss used to turn to me and say, “Deal with it Teal”!

It is easy to ignore the conflicts between work, life, and family until your top engineer quits to run a chicken farm in Texas, or your top trader buys a sailboat and moves to the Bahamas or you realize that employees are under performing by 20% because they are so stressed out. Moreover, it not as simple as telling them to “deal with it”. These are resources that you have spent thousands of dollars to recruit, select, and train. They are working with your top clients on projects that will make more break your organization and you may fail if they are not performing at their best.

Balancing an employee’s work and their personal life is not just an issue for working dads and mom. Single employees as well as married employees who have no children value their free time equally as would any working parent.  While virtually every business needs to increase productivity and decease production costs, pushing employees to a breaking point will achieve neither. Consider the tech-no era concept of telecommuting, once it may have been considered a perquisite, today it is more likely to be an essential to attract and retain your workforce.  Telecommuting and technology is not only for the 20 something dad or mom who wants to work from home or run webinars while the kids are off to school. Baby Boomers outspend their younger cohorts on technology to the turn of $1 trillion dollars annually. And they account for over 30% of the population and they are not planning to retire anytime soon.  While these Boomers may no longer have school age children to care for, they are looking for flexibility in employment so they can travel, pursue new careers, and phase into retirement. In addition, they bring with them 30 plus years of developing the technology that is driving today’s businesses. Boomers will reengineer retirement into whatever meets their needs.

Creating a work-life environment that fits the needs of the organization and the employees is not easy. Nor is it impossible. In many cases it is the ability of the organization to be flexible which the most important ingredient. With the current technology, organizations have the ability to allow work to be performed from home, on the road or in a central or satellite location. Concepts such as “hoteling” allow remote workers to cycle through the “home office” without the need for large and expensive office complexes, while providing a balance to work-life.