The notion of work-life balance has been talked about for decades with the underlying claim that if you achieve it, everything will be perfect. In post-Covid workplaces, hybrid working is becoming the norm and promises of flexibility and yoga on a Thursday lunchtime adorn recruitment adverts. From a distance, it would be easy to think we’ve now nailed the work-life balance challenge. Yet hybrid working hasn’t waved a magic wand and many people struggling feel more like a circus performer, juggling with different-sized objects with sharp corners, whilst riding a unicycle, than they do a calm and collected master balancer.
The real challenge of work/life balance goes much deeper than permission to work from home a couple of days a week. Let’s start by challenging the assumptions in the language of work/life balance. It puts work first in the sentence (and there’s something powerful about the ordering, isn’t there?).
Work is an important part of life, yet does it really come first out of everything? The phrase ‘work/life balance’ ignores the fact that you are still alive when you’re working and there is much life to be had at work – just think of the experiences, friends, and the sense of purpose it gives people. Workplaces that encourage and enable their people to connect with each other and have a purpose in their work will be the front runners in attracting and retaining talent.
Sometimes life outside of work takes over
It also suggests that things stay static when in reality, there are times when this simply isn’t true. Sometimes life outside of work takes over, like building a family, having a hobby, or moving house. Employers must remember that life happens to people whilst they’re working, so being responsive to these needs is essential – and that respect will be paid back with interest. Sometimes work takes over, like big projects, demanding customers, and challenging deadlines. Being aware that rest and recovery are key drivers of great performance means that these need to be built in – expecting humans to be able to work at over 100% capacity repeatedly is both unrealistic and unhealthy.
For individuals, the quest to find the holy grail of work/life balance is like trying to find the needle in the haystack of life. That’s not to say that balance isn’t a good thing – having anything out of kilter can have a serious impact on their ability to maintain performance. Instead of the see-saw of balance – being weighed down at one end or the other (or more realistically, the work end because I’m not hearing anyone saying they want less life and more work!) – how about helping them to create a more realistic version of what work looks like in the context of life?
Ask them to visualise a massive transparent balloon (one of those fancy ones from a party shop), that can have other balloons blown up inside it. The transparent balloon is representative of their whole life. Each inner balloon represents a feature of life that is important – like friends, or family, work (the paid kind), unpaid work and hobbies for example.
The balloons will be unique to each person and the size of each inner balloon can expand and contract based on the choices made about how much time and energy are dedicated to them.
The outer balloon is fixed by the annoying limitation of time available and even that is variable depending on individual responsibilities.. The inner balloons are either controllable or at least influenceable. The more the inner balloons are looked after, the more the outer balloon feels like it’s a little bit more flexible.
Once the balloons are mapped out, they can review and consider the following:
- Are there too many balloons and are they rubbing up against each other, with no space in between, creating static? It’s time to make some tough choices about what stays and what goes.
- There are usually some balloons that act as incredible energy suppliers. Encourage your people to get to know why these balloons give joy and consider how to maximise their impact. We often overestimate the time it takes to do something joyful, so little and often might be the key here.
- Are some balloons guzzling up energy but never offering anything in return? These may need some work to understand what they are and why they’re sapping energy. Boundaries are likely to be what’s needed here.
- Perhaps there are missing balloons, the ones that have been unconsciously deflated because life and work have gotten in the way. These are likely to be neglected joy-givers (because most of us have to work, it’s almost always the joy that gets cancelled) and finding a little space to reinstate them will be beneficial.
- Because life throws a variety of both wonderful and heart-breaking things at us, sometimes one balloon may need to be considerably larger than all the others. That may mean that some orbs need to deflate a little for a while. They’re not gone, they’re ready and waiting for when there is space to breathe life into them.
So rather than encouraging your people to aim for the mythical work-life balance, why not support them to experiment with opportunities to better understand and manage the investment of time and energy across all areas of life. To stop and consider what’s really important. Maybe you’ll help them set and protect boundaries around balloons that have the habit of expanding beyond their allocated space. Perhaps you can enable them to breathe life into previously deflated balloons, ones that bring them joy. They’ll likely find that breathing even a tiny bit of life into a balloon that brings you joy will infect other balloons through an osmotic effect, creating a disproportionately better outcome than you could even imagine. And who wouldn’t want joyful, engaged and productive people in their workplace?
Beth Stallwood is a coach, facilitator, speaker, consultant, author, and the founder of Create WorkJoy. She’s spent 20 years developing her signature practical, passionate approach, and excels at getting to the heart of what’s actually going on – whether that’s for an individual client stuck in WorkGloom or an organisation with a people challenge to solve. Beth is also the author of WorkJoy: A Toolkit for a Better Working Life.
July 30, 2024
Challenging the concept of work-life balance as we know it
by Beth Stallwood • Comment, Wellbeing
The real challenge of work/life balance goes much deeper than permission to work from home a couple of days a week. Let’s start by challenging the assumptions in the language of work/life balance. It puts work first in the sentence (and there’s something powerful about the ordering, isn’t there?).
Work is an important part of life, yet does it really come first out of everything? The phrase ‘work/life balance’ ignores the fact that you are still alive when you’re working and there is much life to be had at work – just think of the experiences, friends, and the sense of purpose it gives people. Workplaces that encourage and enable their people to connect with each other and have a purpose in their work will be the front runners in attracting and retaining talent.
It also suggests that things stay static when in reality, there are times when this simply isn’t true. Sometimes life outside of work takes over, like building a family, having a hobby, or moving house. Employers must remember that life happens to people whilst they’re working, so being responsive to these needs is essential – and that respect will be paid back with interest. Sometimes work takes over, like big projects, demanding customers, and challenging deadlines. Being aware that rest and recovery are key drivers of great performance means that these need to be built in – expecting humans to be able to work at over 100% capacity repeatedly is both unrealistic and unhealthy.
For individuals, the quest to find the holy grail of work/life balance is like trying to find the needle in the haystack of life. That’s not to say that balance isn’t a good thing – having anything out of kilter can have a serious impact on their ability to maintain performance. Instead of the see-saw of balance – being weighed down at one end or the other (or more realistically, the work end because I’m not hearing anyone saying they want less life and more work!) – how about helping them to create a more realistic version of what work looks like in the context of life?
The balloons will be unique to each person and the size of each inner balloon can expand and contract based on the choices made about how much time and energy are dedicated to them.
The outer balloon is fixed by the annoying limitation of time available and even that is variable depending on individual responsibilities.. The inner balloons are either controllable or at least influenceable. The more the inner balloons are looked after, the more the outer balloon feels like it’s a little bit more flexible.
Once the balloons are mapped out, they can review and consider the following:
So rather than encouraging your people to aim for the mythical work-life balance, why not support them to experiment with opportunities to better understand and manage the investment of time and energy across all areas of life. To stop and consider what’s really important. Maybe you’ll help them set and protect boundaries around balloons that have the habit of expanding beyond their allocated space. Perhaps you can enable them to breathe life into previously deflated balloons, ones that bring them joy. They’ll likely find that breathing even a tiny bit of life into a balloon that brings you joy will infect other balloons through an osmotic effect, creating a disproportionately better outcome than you could even imagine. And who wouldn’t want joyful, engaged and productive people in their workplace?
Beth Stallwood is a coach, facilitator, speaker, consultant, author, and the founder of Create WorkJoy. She’s spent 20 years developing her signature practical, passionate approach, and excels at getting to the heart of what’s actually going on – whether that’s for an individual client stuck in WorkGloom or an organisation with a people challenge to solve. Beth is also the author of WorkJoy: A Toolkit for a Better Working Life.