As I make the exciting journey from a job at the company that I’ve spent a good 16 years of my life to a new job, I’ve been thinking a lot about work life balance. There is comfort from knowing what you do and how to do that well. When you move to a new job, this typically also means working longer, stressing out more, and working harder.
In my youth, I was naive and would say to my friends,” Work life balance just means that you can slack off and no one will say anything about it.” Now, as an older and more experienced Engineer, I now know that defining work life balance is much more nuanced than that.
Through the pandemic, I felt that that phrase has become mainstream. For companies wanting to attract and retain talent, I felt that phrase became an essential selling point and if a job description didn’t have it, they would be at a competitive disadvantage.
But what really is work life balance? Whenever a colleague or a direct report of mine brings up work life balance, I often have to ask them to define what it means for them at that point in time. Oftentimes, their definitions are different from my definition. How much work is too much work differs person to person. It gets complicated when we bring in the type of work (some jobs are more stressful than others) and the timing (am I on call?). I think the time factor distinction is important — what one person thinks as work life balance in one point in their life may be completely different at a future point in their life.
The fact is that work life balance means different things to different people at a given point in their life. Given this, to bring back my first paragraph, to some, work life balance may mean not working hard and to others, it doesn’t imply this at all. To some, work life balance may mean working throughout the entire day but taking hour long breaks throughout the day and to others, it doesn’t imply this at all.
Personally, the phrase “work life balance” doesn’t immediately bring any negative thoughts, but it also doesn’t bring any positive thoughts either.
I feel work life balance becomes concerning when this becomes synonymous to rarely working hard and never extending our hours to when the times require it.
The good thing is that it’s typically easy to spot the two extremes of having too much “work” and too much “life” – everything in between is where I feel the sweet spot is where I always try to put myself in and also urge my direct reports to go towards. We don’t want employees to work insane hours and we want employees to be excited about work. The sweet spot is different for each individual and knowing what that is becomes clearer through “get to know you” conversations and career discussions in 1:1s and informal conversations.
I can certainly improve in this area. Though I have always had conversations with those who I felt was working too much, I haven’t been the best at having work life balance conversations with those who was spending 40 hours a week.
I think that all we can really agree on is that work life balance matters — and it matters a whole lot.
If I were to highlight one thing in this post is that we all should be having conversations about work life balance with those we work with to help us understand what it means for them, what motivates them to spend more time at work and home, when we need to be more lenient and understanding, and when we should push a little harder.
