The Illusive Work-Life Balance Goal
Despite claims by companies that they want better work-life balance for their employees, they often ignore the main work culture culprits.
What I read: “The Quest to Imagine a Workplace that (Actually) Values Work-Life Balance” by Brigid Schulte. Published September 24, 2024.
For the past couple of decades, I’ve heard the phrase “work-life balance” bandied about within corporate cultures and in the general social ethos.
My last corporate job had excellent work-life balance, but it wasn’t because of specific programs, internal affinity groups, or Human Resources efforts. It was, in my opinion, for one specific reason – I had a management chain of command that trusted us and empowered us to do our work in the manner that best fit our lives and work styles. The result? Our entire organization thrived, and I think it was one of the happiest and most productive organizations within the entire Fortune 100 company for which I worked. I will forever be grateful for my immediate manager and his upper management chain. They know how to do it.
When I read Brigid Schulte’s article, so much of what she says resonated with me and my decades of experience working in work cultures from small businesses to mega corporations and everything in between.
I was lucky enough to work from home for much of my last corporate gig tenure. That allowed me to focus and concentrate in ways that never would have been possible in an office. Why? Well, while my company managed our time commitments extremely well, this still happens far too often in other office environments.
In conversation after conversation, workers said they spent their days being super busy, rushing from one meeting to the next, jumping on and off the phone, and plowing through their email. It was only at what should have been the end of the paid workday that they realized they hadn’t gotten to the one big thing they really needed to do. Their work hours were constantly interrupted and filled with busywork.
I have contended for a long time that one of the worst environments for getting work done is the typical corporate office. Distractions abound. And that doesn't take into consideration often lengthy wasted commute time to and from that distracting office.
Schulte points out that researchers discovered that desk workers in an office are interrupted about every three minutes. Think about that. Every three minutes. How can anyone get anything done in an office? It boggles the mind sometimes.
Even worse than the interruptions is the recovery time. It takes more than 20 minutes to return to where you were in your workflow before being interrupted. Again, how does anyone get anything done in an office?
Schulte alludes to the rampant number of meetings many in corporate culture endure. They often accept meetings as a necessary evil because that’s how it’s been done for so long.
One survey found that executives spend, on average, twenty-five hours a week in meetings, half of which could disappear without any negative impact. Those lower down the corporate ladder spend about ten hours a week in meetings and say 43 percent are a waste of time. But they go because they have to, or they fear they’ll miss out, or they want to show their managers how busy and committed they are. This means huge swaths of the workweek are a huge waste of time and money.
When one is in an office, there is often lots of performative activity taking place. Everyone wants to “look” busy. Schulte mentions that authors Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel call such performative activity “live-action-role-playing the job” and that’s about the best description I’ve ever read. Schulte points out that in overworked office cultures those who “appear” to perform well are often the ones who are rewarded, not necessarily the workers who simply get the work done without any of the performative nonsense.
But that performative nonsense sadly seems to be necessary at times to get ahead and progress within a company. I’ve certainly done it. I know others reading this have too. We “play the game” because we know that’s how to win the game (get a promotion, get a raise, and so on).
Schulte points out a phenomenon called “tunneling” when rabid workplace hecticness creates a narrowed ability to focus. The less focus at our disposal, the worse our work output and the lower the overall company’s productivity.
In my book, The Art of Self-Education: How to Get a Quality Education for Personal and Professional Success Without Formal Schooling (paid link), I mention one of my favorite books by Alan H. Cohen, Why Your Life Sucks and What You Can Do About It (paid link). Cohen offer some of the best advice I’ve read in a self-improvement book.
The secret of genius is focus. If you can laser your attention on any subject or project, it will reveal its blueprint to you. George Washington Carver discovered 325 uses for the peanut and 100 for the sweet potato! Great geniuses are powerful focusers. Many have been called eccentric or insane because they put aside worldly concerns for the sake of their music, art, architecture, drama, inventing, or writing. But they are the individuals who change the world, while those with scattered attention wade through mediocre lives. Geniuses don’t fritter their precious minds on mass trends. They create the trends that alter the masses.
Without focus, our work suffers. The modern office environment and surrounding work culture appears to do everything possible to foster a loss of focus by their workers. It makes absolutely no sense.
Schulte and her colleagues envisioned a new type of company leader, and they designed, implemented, and tested practical interventions focused on four key pain points:
Long hours
Endless and often pointless meetings
The guilt people felt about vacations (which they often didn’t take)
Email
I’ll let you read the article itself for a deeper dive into their results, but I hope anyone reading this who leads a company or manages a team understands just how destructive typical office culture is to productivity and how much it can subtract from the company’s productivity (and profitability) bottom line.
As a side note, in 2013 I read a book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier, Remote: Office Not Required (paid link). I had already been working remotely much of the time at my current job, but after reading the book I became even more convinced that entirely remote or hybrid remote/in-office work situations are the definitive path to work cultures that respect a true work-life balance environment. I recommend the book.
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