6 minute read
Finding work-life balance
Work-Life BALANCE
Sure, now get back to work
BY Michael Giotis
FAMILY MATTERS Sometimes working at home is a family affair.
One of the ways to control work-life balance is to talk about it. I did just that with two experts, both from Berkeley's Haas Business School, one a professor and one a recent graduate, to see what these members of an elite educational institution knew about taking it easy.
Dr. Homa Bahrami is an “expert on organizational flexibility and dynamic leadership” at Haas. After canceling our interview because of my son's sudden orthopedic-surgeon appointment and her canceling for her own reasons, we needed that flexibility just to meet up.
I wanted to know how, over the course of the pandemic, work-life balance changed.
“There are some practices that really vary depending on where you are in your life, Michael,” she said. “For example, are you young and unattached? A single individual?”
Uh, who’s asking, Doc?
Then I got her point. Different people at different stages in their lives face different challenges during this time. And they have different opportunities.
“Some of my younger students really miss the social aspect of being in the office, going for lunch [and] going for drinks afterwards,” she said.
Meanwhile, privileged parents with » young children also find these times to be a big change from the lives they once
knew. Dr. Bahrami shared an example » told to her by a masters’ student at her elite school: “I’m saving a lot on childcare, because I don’t need my nanny to come at seven o’clock in the morning so I can commute to work and, you know, be back by seven o’clock at night.”
“If you even have a nanny,” Bahrami added, thoughtfully. Right: work hard enough, get a nanny. Wait, weren’t we talking about work-life balance?
“In the past we used to [say] ‘I live to work,’ Bahrami said. “In other words, work is a big, big part of my life, and everything else has to fit around it—my childcare, my social time, my vacations, etc. Now, after two years of working from home, people are saying, ‘I work to live.’ People are putting their total lifestyle front-and-center, and asking, ‘How do I want to work? Where do I want to live? How do I want to spend my time?’”
For example, commute time. The reader will be surprised, or not, to learn that, according to Bahrami’s research, 90% of people like the fact that they don’t have to commute and can use that time for other purposes.
So, positive changes with the workfrom-home lifestyle include saving time and increasing productivity. On the other hand, transition time and the ability to focus have really taken a hit. At home, distractions can be everywhere. Like that bike waiting to be ridden, that dog asking for a healthy walk. Aren’t these “distractions” part of good work-life balance?
Time off?
Yennell Selman is the founder of Cultiveit, a startup that helps companies organize high-quality time off. She began our conversation with the question that guides her company. “How do you make the most of your time off so that when you come back to work you’re feeling good, not so tired?” Selman asked.
I heard, “Be ready to work.”
“What we’ve seen is, [chuckles] basically, people are still working more hours, so a lot of the time they used to spend commuting or traveling or having, you know, lunches with their co-workers or informal conversations, a lot of that has been on Zoom at their workstations,” Selman said.
Organizations may be the best way to set an example for how to be intentional. “We really think that is a key that hasn’t been leveraged in workplaces,” Selman said. “Really thinking through being intentional with your time off.”
Anything to help all of us here during the pandemic, drowning in our schedules.
“Now, all of a sudden, you have way more flexibility with your schedule, but you have way less distance from work,” Selman said. “You used to kind of have a buffer between your work space and your home space, and now that’s sort of blended together. Folks are operating with old mindsets, they are not putting their computers away intentionally at the end of the day.”
Selman’ mission is to save us from burnout, so we can get back to work. Wait, why do I care about burnout? »
»The problem, historically, is that the conversation around burnout “has been really clinical, really medicalized, really focused on the individual as a person who needs to manage their own work life balance.” Selman and her company help organizations put resources into helping employees with burnout, so they don’t have to fi gure it all out themselves. And thank goodness, because please don’t ask an individual in burnout to add another thing to their list of action items. It will break them.
“Something that has really changed in the pandemic is thinking about this at an organizational level,” Selman said. “Too many choices [for high-quality free time] can seem like … an extra to-do.” By “taking the logistics o the plates of the employees,” business can provide the “time and budgets to [organize] highquality experiences.”
Selman puts this in the perspective of “quality of respite,” a term found in the research literature on burnout. It is not just taking time o that matters, it is what we do during that time. Companies can help to organize activities to make sure it happens. In short: company-wide paid high-quality time o . Huzzah.
Burnout is real
All jokes aside, burnout is real. Eight in 10 employees experience at least one of the symptoms of burnout. So I have to know, do employees really have the option to turn o at those times?
“These topics of ‘burnout,’ ‘sustainable peak performance’ [and] ‘work-life balance,’ really can’t be addressed at an individual level, it really has to be addressed at a cultural level,” Selman said.
So then, what would be a systemic response to individual burnout?
Selman gave an example, “In Amsterdam, burnout leave is already available. In the U.S. it will look di erent. My guess is that [di erent levels of treatment] will be o ered based on people’s levels of burnout.”
So, it turns out there are three degrees of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism and hopelessness.
“Sounds familiar,” I said.
“What was that?” Selman asked.
“Rings a bell, right?” I said.
We laughed together.
“Yeah, it’s so pervasive,” she said, then continued. Each degree of burnout has its own appropriate treatment. For exhaustion, a massage would be excellent, while someone in the depths of cynicism might resent the massage. Those in the throes of hopelessness need a longer break, to allow for some true detachment. “Corporate sabbaticals are on the rise,” Selman added. “The real future is providing for each of these systematically.”
“Plus massages,” I said, hopefully.
Selman laughed and said, “Massages have to be standard throughout, yep.”
Check out the resources in the side box to deal with your burnout. ❤
Burnout Resources from Haas Business School and beyond.
DR. HOMA BAHRAMI RECOMMENDS:
Organize work time into focused sprints
Protect your calendar carefully
Schedule 15-minute breaks between meetings or sprints
Greater Good Science Center (greatergood.berkeley.edu)
Get your body active
Do something intrinsically satisfying
Stimulate your senses
Stay disconnected from devices
Be courageous!
