As the sun sets behind Mount Desert Island on the central coast of Maine, the black bears in Acadia National Park sniff the cool autumn air in search of food. For several hours the bears will forage for the calories they need to prepare for winter. With the sun in the southern hemisphere, black bears will soon bed down for a long rest. They’ve evolved in perfect balance with the environment, in sync with changes in the availability of resources. Their deliberate periods of activity and rest allow them to thrive in the rugged environment of Maine’s coastline.
Two hundred miles to the southwest, the bio-technology researchers, financial managers and university students in Boston follow an entirely different rhythm. Streams of red and white lights on the highway portend work that starts before sunrise and ignores the sunset. People migrate along the city sidewalks at a pace that would impress the bears, hustling to catch the next train to take them back downstream to their homes. While a black bear may find solace high in a tree to take a nap, the lights burning on the upper floors of the city’s office buildings reveal human beings at work late into the evening. Heat and air conditioning prevent the indoor temperature from ever changing, a condition that would puzzle the bears but allows people to deliver uniform output all year.
The contrast between our behavior and that of our ursine neighbors should prompt us to pause for a moment, but our frenetic pace has become such a habit that the idea of pausing seems quaint. For many of us, the deep-rooted desire to take a rest is squelched by a worried urge to keep going as we try to accomplish everything we’ve set out to do. Balance between work and rest is elusive.
Great leaders don’t let their people struggle to find balance on their own
The demands of our modern, connected lives mean that we all struggle with countless responsibilities both at work and at home. Somehow the responsibility to manage the responsibilities, and to find balance between those of work and home, seems to have fallen solely on our own shoulders. There is no lifeguard at this beach; we need to endure the waves and currents on our own. As the hot sun of unspoken social expectation to do it all shines down, we try to make it look like we’re having fun in the water when really we want to haul ourselves up on the beach in exhaustion.
There are few opportunities for us to take charge of our relationship with work. The only levers we have available to tune our lives for balance are major career decisions, choosing between high profile jobs with frantic, burn-out pace or slower work that sacrifices career progression. The intensity of the work itself is assumed to be fixed; it’s as if we’ve all given up on making the work itself more tolerable. The only way to moderate our work lives is to moderate how fully we embrace work. The burden to choose is entirely our own. Senior leaders are off the hook, as if work-life balance is a personal choice that they have nothing to do with. That’s not right.
Leaders have a responsibility to proactively guard the work-life balance of the people they lead. Great leaders design their organizations to succeed without burning out their people. I think there are several things leaders should do to strategically build defenses for work-life balance to benefit their peoples’ sanity - and performance.
Every organization has a cultural norm for work time. It may surprise you.
The first leadership strategy is to carefully observe your people at work to learn about your organization’s cultural norm for work time. Do people feel free to depart when their work is complete? Do they secretly spend their evenings catching up on work they couldn’t finish during the day? Or do people create work to fill the time they feel they are expected to spend at the office? The latter condition may exist even if you find people are working long hours after the end of the official workday. Highly motivated employees may be seduced into a culture of long hours as a sort of badge of courage or rite of passage. Those people find themselves trapped in an abusive relationship where staying late is seen as a sign of commitment – even if the work doesn’t truly require the extra time. Leaders should be courageous about intervening in this situation. It may be necessary to turn out the lights, send everyone home and lock the doors. Action to break an unhealthy cultural norm shows commitment to balance and forces workers to efficiently and diligently work during a shorter workday. They very well may discover that once the silent expectation to stay late is gone, they have no trouble doing getting their jobs done and leaving earlier.
While a leader is looking at the organization’s cultural norms for work hours, it is also important that they look at their own habits. The leader’s actions are the strongest signal of expectations for work time. If the boss likes to schedule hour-long meetings at 6 p.m., any talk about the importance of getting out of the office will ring hollow. A team’s work-life balance starts at the top; if the leader doesn’t have it no one else will.
Balance depends on clear expectations – inside and outside the organization
A healthy organizational culture of work time is built on clear expectations about office hours and after-hours phone and email availability. People at all levels of the organization need to have a shared understanding of what is expected. Leaders should also set expectations for customers or other parties external to the organization. We live in a world of immediate digital communication. Even a small number of customers can create a great deal of afterhours work, and stress, if they expect immediate replies from workers who are trying to get some exercise or put their kids to bed. Leaders must defend their employees’ rest time by setting expectations for customers, and in the event a customer pushes back, holding firm. If leaders, employees and customers all have a shared understanding of the organization’s work hours and after-hours responsiveness, business will happen at an appropriate pace. Employees won’t feel pressured to reply to a late night email and customers won’t feel slighted by a reply that doesn’t come until the next day.
An organization can work all day every day even if individual workers cannot
A leader’s job is more difficult when the organization does need to operate for more than eight hours a day or needs to respond to customers at night or on weekends. This entirely realistic situation demands a specific strategy: leaders need to design the organization’s structure and practices to separate individual employees’ workdays from the organization’s overall workday. Organizations can successfully run long hours every day; individual people cannot. Like a factory with three shifts, leaders need to figure out how to run their organization at the necessary pace while letting people come and go throughout the day. That is the only way to have both exceptional organizational performance and employees who feel they can balance their work and rest.
Leaders must accept that this strategy will require more people than a traditional organization that insists that individuals work as long as the organization works. Instead of assigning one person to be responsible for a set of duties, the better way is to assign a team of people to those duties. A single person should still be responsible for the team’s performance, but they should be empowered to develop a time model that ensures the team is always performing its duties while individual team members are able to work and rest as needed to maintain balance. This is exactly how the military manages to operate for twenty-four hours a day: someone is always on watch, but someone else is always resting.
The critical resource that fuels this model is trust. No person can be present the entire time a long day every day type of organization is up and running; the organization must be able to carry on without them. Leaders need to trust their subordinates to make decisions and act even when the leaders aren’t physically present. Leaving the ship with someone else’s hands on the wheel may make a leader nervous, but confidence in other people is critically important to work-life balance. Leaders need to trust all their people, not just their favorite all-stars. A leader who demands that high performing employees always take the critical or demanding work tasks will burn those people out until they’re no longer high performing employees. Finally, leaders should trust workers to manage their work responsibilities within the context of their lives. An organization set up for success enables people to work together to make sure everything gets done, allowing a person to step out for a medical appointment or child’s sporting event without advance permission from the top.
Work-life balance will inevitably be attacked. Be ready to defend it.
Even after achieving the perfect organizational design and culture for work and rest time, a leader’s work is not done. Less savvy leaders will look at flexible workday design, or see people coming and going as they need, and incorrectly conclude the organization could achieve more by demanding more from its employees, or that it could achieve the same with fewer people. Great leaders are ready to defend their work-life balance strategies when others suggest it’s too expensive. Be prepared with smart arguments about inevitable employee burnout if balance is sacrificed. Point out that people will leave the organization, lowering productivity and increasing recruiting and training costs. Do whatever it takes- it is a leader’s responsibility to fight on behalf of your people. If all else fails, invite any work-life balance naysayers to take a drive north to Acadia National Park and go visit the black bears.