Work Life Balance: Balancing Time is a big challenge

A Regular Weekend Scenario

Imagine your wife has thrown a party at home to celebrate your 40th birthday. The guests are supposed to arrive by 8 pm. It’s a Friday and being a working day a few of the guests are arriving early as they are coming straight from the office.  You have shut down your laptop and planning to leave at sharp 6 pm. Travelling a distance of 15 km back home will take at least 1.30 hours. Traffic is going to be heavy!

The moment you decide to leave office, you see your boss coming out of the Director room. He is quite tense. It’s your bad luck as he encounters you on the way back to his cabin. He just utters one sentence, “Come in my cabin immediately”. You curse your stars as why you didn’t leave 5 minutes early. It’s virtually impossible to reach back home on time now. You will have to cut a sorry figure in front of your guests. Add to this the music which you will have to face from your wife.  Rest what happens in the office, I would not like to elaborate, as it is obvious. This is where your Work-Life Balance goes for a toss.

The Weekly Resolution

Every week on Monday, I take a pledge that I will improve on my Work-Life Balance and try to reach home on time at least 3 out of 5 days. But it rarely happens.  Also, when I am saying “on-time” it doesn’t mean that I will reach home as per the office closing plus the commuting time. “On-time” is a time range that stretches from post-sunset to just before dinner. In spite of my weekly resolutions, I seldom implement it.

Well, some may question my efficiency levels as I am not able to finish work on time. But in all fairness, I am one of those who would like to finish work on time.

My Workplace

Just like everybody I also have a boss whose day starts at 4 pm and his most productive time is after office hours. This is the period when his grey cells start working. Being a strong believer in the delegation, he starts distributing important assignments to the entire team.

On days, when he doesn’t have any assignment to delegate, he calls for meetings either on how to improve business or how to recover outstanding? In such a situation it virtually becomes impossible to leave office on time.

I fail to understand why the entire team of 6-7 senior members, including me, are not able to raise their voice against this late sitting practice. The probable reason is that nobody wants to lose his or her equation with the boss for whom sitting late is one of the major performance measure parameters. Gradually the organisation builds an environment where sitting late becomes a part and parcel of the office culture and the Work-Life Balance takes a back seat.

Fighting the Curse of Presenteeism 

The Economist magazine carries a regular column on Employee and Work Culture called Bartleby. In a recent issue dated 18^th May 2019 there is an article which throws light on what goes wrong in Work-Life Balance. It is titled “Fighting the curse of Presenteeism.” Given below are few excerpts:

Demanding Managers want that workers should stay chained to their desks for long periods. At Theranos, a blood testing firm in the US, Sunny Balwani, then the boyfriend of the founder, Elizabeth Holmes, had an obsession with employee hours. He would tour the engineering department at 7.30 pm to check if people were at desks. All those hours were wasted when the company eventually collapsed. Prosecutors have charged Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani with fraud.

There will be days when you do not have much to do, perhaps because you are waiting for someone else in a different department or a different company to respond to a request. As the clock ticks at 5 pm, there may be no purpose in staying at your desk. But you can see your Boss hard at work and more important he can see you. So you make an effort to look busy.

This may become a cycle. If Bosses do not like to go home before their subordinates and subordinates fear to leave before their bosses, everyone is trapped. Staff may feel that they will not get a pay rise, or a promotion if they are not seen to be putting in maximum effort. This is easily confused with long hours. Managers, who are often no good at judging employees performance, use time spent in the office as a parameter.

A preferential treatment to Moms at Workplace

In May 2016, one of the most famous women who works for IBM, Lisa Seacat DeLuca, a mobile software engineer by profession did something which took everybody in office for a surprise. Lisa, who has numerous patents under her belt decided to bring her 5-month-old daughter to an IBM conference (IBM Connect Now) on the last day, a day when most important people have cleared out.

However, she was in for a shock when one of IBM contract employee berated her for bringing her child to a professional conference. Lisa obviously was annoyed and wrote a LinkedIn post. She described herself as a ” mother working” rather than ” working mother”.  I am a mom first, a technologist second and that life is short.

Some CEO’s really care about employees

In a post on LinkedIn, Audrie Burkett working for Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana narrated her dilemma recently. One particular day she couldn’t get a daycare facility for her daughter. There were two very important meetings for her to attend that day. She called the President and CEO Greg Wathen explaining her predicament. He simply told her to bring her daughter to the office.

While Audrie attended the meetings, the CEO was seen pushing the pram with Audrie’s daughter up and down the halls of the office. Audrie posted a picture of her CEO on her post on LinkedIn saying that the Organisation has a culture of understanding the importance of family and the struggles working moms can face. She was thankful to her President who has made Work-Life Balance a priority.

I think there is a lesson here. Women employees who have to play two very demanding roles – one of an employee and the other of a mom should be given an opportunity to bring her kids to the office at times. I know a few organisations who have a nursery at the office where mom can bring their young kids to the office and leave in the daycare center but then such companies are very limited. Similarly, organisations need to be more compassionate with young working mothers. They should have flexi-timings, can be exempted from late office meetings and excused from late night office parties.

Let’s take a pledge!

Life is short and has to be enjoyed! In a world driven by social media, human interactions have come down like anything. Weekends are the only days when we enjoy some quality time with family and friends. The rest 5 days and in some cases 6 days, belong to the organisation. These are days when we all work 8-10 hours and hardly ever get time to leave office on time. If out of 5 days, we can reach back home on time in the evenings on at least 3 days, we will get more time to meet friends as well as spend time with family. It will be a perfect example Work-Life Balance.

We are living in times when even our neighbours don’t recognise us

I don’t know if one has noticed but these days when you go for your morning walk you don’t even recognise most faces walking past you. The neighbors also look at you strangely because they have hardly seen you in the block. There may be few familiar faces but then they are few. This is the irony of life!

It’s time to spend quality time with Parents

It’s time to spend quality time with our aging parents. How many times do we take our parents out? Only when their health is not good and they need medical care. For a change, how about if we take our father out to meet his old college friend. Once in a while, it’s time to thrill your mother by taking her out to a shopping mall just to buy her favourite silk saree.

Your Son plays better than Messi

There can’t be a better moment than watching your son score a goal like Messi in the football field or drinking a cup of tea from your daughter’s tea-set. You can only do this if you reach home on time before sunset. Have you ever noticed the happiness on your son’s face the day he learns to cycle without your support or your daughter swimming without floats?

Spend some precious moment with your wife

And if the wife doesn’t want to cook then time to go out with the family for dinner at a neighborhood joint. I am sure as family we do go out for dinners but only on weekends. Why not weekdays also?

Family time is the best medicine for Stress

Stress levels are increasing and what better way to de-stress by spending some quality time with family and friends even on weekdays. Instead of opting for hypertension and hyper-worked it’s time to change to hyper-family time and hyper-relaxation.

All this is possible if we can understand the value of time, be more disciplined. And also if our organisation starts believing that even an employee’s time is valuable it will go a big way in promoting Work-Life Balance.

Freedom to work from Home

Coming back to The Economist, the story concludes that modern machinery like smartphones and laptops is portable. It can be used as easily at home as in an office. Turning an office into prison, with inmates allowed home for the evenings, does nothing for the creativity that is increasingly demanded of office workers as routine tasks will soon get automated. To be productive you need presence of mind, not being present in flesh.

I will appreciate your inputs! Leave your comments below.

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