Rebecca and Everett sat down at the table together. Their chairs were so close they were touching. They pushed the laptop away until both of their faces were in the frame. They sat quietly as the other faces appeared one by one.
“Good morning,” greeted Janice, Everett’s boss at the renewable energy firm he had worked at for three years. Janice was visible in front of a virtual background of a huge wind turbine slowly spinning over the ocean. She was an environmental lawyer. Janice was uncomfortable with these weekly meetings because nothing was put in writing afterwards.
Before Everett could reply, a man with long gray hair appeared. “Hey everybody! Happy Monday!” Randall was the principal of the high school where Rebecca served as the guidance counselor. He was wearing a Rush t-shirt and sat in front of shelves bulging with CDs stacked both vertically and horizontally in no particular order. He was the first person ever to become principal of the school after first serving as its music teacher. He also played the bass in a Rush cover band on the weekends. This weekly meeting was his idea.
Next to join was Lewis, a third grade teacher at an elementary school in the town where Rebecca and Everett lived. Their daughter Claire was in Lewis’s class, although she had never met him in person. Lewis was in his first year teaching. The only thing visible behind him was the plain white wall of his apartment. He had negotiated with his roommate to use their small dining room table for this meeting.
After a minute, Ingrid joined the meeting. She was starting her twenty-ninth year teaching kindergarten. Lewis had been one of her students. This year she was assigned to teach Thomas, Claire’s younger brother. She sat in front of a white board she had hung on the wall in her living room. The letter T was written next to drawings of a truck, turtle and taco. “We’re going to learn about Thomas’ favorite letter today, he’s going to be so excited” she proclaimed warmly to Rebecca and Everett.
Ignoring the trucks and tacos, Janice got right down to business. “OK everyone, Everett and I have a really important meeting about our environmental impact statement tomorrow at 10. There’s no way he can miss that.” Her proposal was met by the sound of shuffling paper and computer clicking sounds as the others checked their calendars.
Rebecca responded first. “That’s ok, I’m with a student at 9, but we’ll be done by then. I hope. It’s Graham.” Randall chuckled. He knew Graham was extremely extroverted.
Lewis spoke up next “Claire has a science stream then but I can switch her to the afternoon if that works.”
Rebecca shook her head. “I have a workshop with the College Board all afternoon. It’s about the new iPhone version of the SAT.”
“I can cover the afternoon science class. Janice, I’ll have Zeke sit in on the meeting with the seabird people.” Everett was thrilled Claire’s science class was going to bail him out of that meeting with the seabird conservation non-profit. Janice nodded acceptance.
“Just don’t forget to have Thomas find ten things in the house that start with the letter T and mark them on his journal,” Ingrid reminded the parents.
“Don’t worry Ingrid, we actually did the letters T and D yesterday when it was raining. We’re good until Thursday I think.” Rebecca replied.
“That’s great, but please don’t let him go until Thursday without doing some school work. We need to keep the little ones in the routine of doing school from home.” Ingrid was still worried about kids taking one step forward but two steps back. Everett clicked the thumbs up button and the smily face button as he grinned at Ingrid.
“Great! Rebecca and Everett, how are you guys doing with all this?” Randall asked. They both laughed nervously and looked to each other hoping the other would have an answer.
Would this meeting ever happen for your family?
It seems unlikely that a meeting like that would ever happen. Work-life balance is a challenge for people because too many organizations operate with the assumption that anything employees do outside the workplace is not their concern. Organizations are willfully ignorant of the greater context of their workers’ lives. At best, that shows respect for their privacy. But it also allows them to pretend employees’ service to the organization is the only thing that exists. If the only thing that matters is work, and life is not on the organization’s radar, it is incapable of knowing about the balance of work and life.
If the organization doesn’t understand the balance, workers fight the battle alone. Work-life balance becomes a crucible workers face alone. It will boil down to a battle of a person against work, an individual against the organization they work for. An adversarial relationship between an organization and its own people is never good.
That adversity is self-defeating for the organization. Poor work-life balance impacts a person’s performance at work. Everyone has a certain amount of daily time or energy they can dedicate to work on a sustained, long-term basis. People can tip the balance in the favor of work to make a short term surge effort, but if they push too hard for too long eventually they will physically and mentally tire. If an organization pushes its people past the point of balance as a course of normal operations, everyone will always be exhausted and the performance of the organization will suffer.
Organizational leaders are responsible for the performance of the organization. Work-life is one of the factors that impacts performance. So leaders who fail to manage their people with balance in mind are failing to maximize their organization’s performance potential.
Leaders cannot manage with balance in mind if they are ignorant of the life side of the work-life balance equation. Our cultural phobia about knowing what is going on in workers’ lives is a detriment to organizational performance.
Leaders should be aware of their workers’ lives to the degree that workers want to share
Leaders can start to build awareness of others’ lives away from work by first sharing a bit of their own home lives. Find ways to chat about what you did on the weekend in informal conversations (if you lead people and you’re not having informal conversations, it’s time to start). Be open about the balance decisions you’re making in your own life. Leaders open about their own lives make it safe for others to do the same.
Next, leaders should use the space they’ve created to engage with others about their own lives away from work. This requires a little finesse. A leader can start the conversation with a question like how do you feel about your balance between work and life? and see where the conversation goes. People may be comfortable having that conversation or they may perceive it as an intrusion. Or even a test. It is important not to push too hard if a person is reluctant to talk about it. It is even more important to not give them the impression you think they aren’t working hard enough!
I have written about how leaders can take action once they learn more about how people are balancing work and life in their organization. But I think these trying times demand new ideas. Work has never been more present in people’s homes, so leaders need to be there too.
Lead outside the box a little
A new reality of working from home is that spouses are becoming collaborators. Spouses have a huge new interest in their significant other’s work-life balance. So for those employees up for it, why not include their spouse or significant other in a conversation about work-life balance? Why not include the people who have the best knowledge of a worker’s balance? A conversation with a worker and their spouse may be unprecedented but it could be great for everyone.
The biggest benefit could be an improved sense of empathy in both directions between a family and a boss. It is impossible to see a person only in terms of their work productivity when you meet their family. A family that chats with the boss knows they are a person too, not an organizational robot blind to their challenges. By having a family conversation, a leader makes it clear that they care about work-life balance and it’s not just the worker’s problem to solve. The leader owns it too. The leader is willing to talk about balance, and that is a conversation about a worker’s life outside the organization’s business. If a particular family struggles to find satisfactory daycare, and that makes work-life balance difficult for them, then the leader will be concerned with daycare.
A conversation like the one Rebecca and Everett had would require many people to be very comfortable opening up about their personal lives. It would require leaders willing to make tweaks to the work side of the work-life balance equation to accommodate school or even another organization that a spouses works for. In the typical American workplace culture, people may not be ready for these conversations, but we should try to get there. Organizations dextrous enough to understand their people’s lives can proactively manage work-life balance and will enjoy better individual performance. They will outperform other organizations that decide to remain ignorant of their workers lives.