Work-Life Balance

The March 2014 edition of the Harvard Business Review was dedicated to “Work vs Life: Forget about balance – you have to make choices” – a fresh spin on how to answer the perennial question of how to “balance” work and life. With the question “can we give our all to our careers and still live full lives”, one of the most interesting articles to propose a solution was “Manage Your Work, Manage Your Life” by B. Groysberg and R. Abrahams, in which they suggest five key points as to how to make those critical choices (or plans) so as to balance both your work and your life…

Here’s how to achieve “work-life balance” followed by further considerations (“et alors”)

Work-Life Balance

Drawing on a five year study with thousands executives the authors found that achieving “satisfaction” in work-life balance tended to relate to making “deliberate” choices (or plans) regarding five key points:

Defining Success

The authors say that you cannot achieve success in terms of managing work-life balance without first defining what success means to you, individually. There is no common standard – the point is that you are not going to be content unless you know what you want to achieve.

Managing Technology

The choice here is in the form of your own “technology policy”. How do you define an urgent call that means you have to leave the Sunday family dinner? When will you switch your Smartphone on and off; and when is there a “blackout” period for emails…

Building Support Networks

You can’t do it on your own. The choice here is where to build your support networks: in or outside work (or both). Not just emotional support and “mentoring”, but actual support should also be considered such as child care and domestic help.

Travelling or Relocating Selectively

If you relocate you have to want to relocate otherwise it can potentially cause problems both for your work and for your life. Similarly careful consideration must be given to how much travel you are willing to commit to otherwise what sounds good on “paper” could damage your “balance.”

Collaborating with Your Partner

In a way, this is an extension of the first point – defining success in terms of work-life balance should be something decided on and agreed by both partners; otherwise tensions might arise which will not help the equilibrium!

Et alors

All the points above are straightforward and make a lot of sense. Defining your own terms of success and having a tactical plan to manage the always-connected modern communication technology will certainly help define what “balance” is and what it is not so that you can tend towards the balance. Support networks should not be overlooked – when you are trying to balance work and life, you might not have time to engage with everyone you would like to and share your situation; when in fact, that might help more than anything else. Similarly it seems like good advice to think about “contracting out” some of the domestic work to free up time for “life”…

The last two points are a bit more contentious. Making strategic choices about travel and relocating are all very well, but once in a job or an industry, travel and relocation can start to appear through the “back door” and it is not always a clear “choice” for the employee. It might come down more to “compromise” than “choice” in a lot of cases. For partner collaboration, the research of working executives highlighted that there was a large difference in the statistics between the sexes which might mean it could be more challenging for women to achieve work-life balance, viz: 88% of the men were married compared with 70% of the women. Of those, 60% of the men had spouses who did not work “full time outside the home” compared with only 10% of women…!

Better Time Management

You might hear yourself saying that you are “too busy to get all your work done!” Almost a paradox, this is the common plight of today’s “knowledge-worker”. So, how do you make yourself less busy so that you can concentrate on the work that matters? Birkinshaw and Cohen studied this question and published their results in the HBR article “Make Time for the Work That Matters” (September 2013). They found that most knowledge workers spend their time managing up, down or across whilst also managing externally and also performing desk work. Generally, not much adjustment could be found to managing up, down or externally; however on average, up to 20% of a knowledge-worker’s week could be saved by reviewing their time spent on “desk-based work” and “managing across.”

Here’s how to better manage your time followed by further considerations (“et alors”).

Better Time Management

From their research the authors found that “desk-based work” and “managing across” were considered not only time consuming, but low value-added and often tedious. So why is this work being done? Mostly because of being “entangled in a web of commitments from which it can be painful to extricate ourselves.” Addressing this root cause, the authors propose a five-point plan to better manage your time:

Identify low-value tasks

Look at your daily activities and decide which ones are not important to you or your firm. Then consider whether they are relatively easy to drop, delegate or redesign. For those that match these two criteria, you have “targets.”

Drop, Delegate or Redesign

Drop “quick kills” (those activities which you can stop immediately with no negative effects); delegate “opportunities” (activities which may be of more value to your team members); or redesign processes (which may require investment, but will save time in the long-term).

Off-load tasks

Caught in the belief that if you want something done properly you should do it yourself? Actually most knowledge-workers can delegate a further 2-20% of their work “with no decline in their productivity or their team’s.” Besides team engagement improving, you save time!

Allocate freed-up time

A common trap is to save time and then just have it fill up with more “desk-based” and “managing across” work. To be effective, determine how best to allocate the time that you have saved! Just make a simple note of 2 or 3 things that you can (now) do and make sure you do them!

Commit to your plan

Share your plan with a mentor, your boss or a colleague. Explain why you are dropping, delegating, redesigning or “off-loading” certain activities. By making a promise to others, a public commitment will help you from returning to bad habits.

Et alors

It is important to remember that the focus is on “desk-based work” and “managing across” activities. You will probably be already spending an appropriate amount of time managing up, down and externally and these tasks will normally be difficult to rearrange. What might happen when applying the five-step plan is that you end up spending more time managing down, but there should be a positive pay-off to this! In the research, the authors found that there was another category of work that hardly anyone had time to save from because they did not do enough of it to start with: that was the “training and development” of staff. Executives in this particular study only spent on average 1% of their time on talent development. Evidently there is a trade-off between short and long-term time management, but if you are too busy to get your work done, you might want to consider stopping and instead developing your team so that you can effectively start delegating, redesigning and off-loading!