Sunday, July 24, 2011

Work-life harmony!

Work life balance harmony!



Wikipedia defines ‘work life balance’ as: “One can say that Work–life balance is the proper prioritizing between "work" (career and ambition) on one hand and "life" (pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development) on the other”.  When one visualize the word ‘balance’ these are some of the pictures that come to mind.
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We usually use the word ‘balance’ in the context of two different things - most of the time one against other.  The irony of it is that we unconsciously pit work against life - and the  underlying (yet unspoken) conclusion is that you cannot have both and it is usually one at the expense of the other.   This invariably leads to a situation where ones work becomes ones salvation and despair at the same time: by providing the means of supporting life, but making life hardly worth supporting.  (Apologies to PG Wodehouse - adapted from his story Man Upstairs)
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Contrary to popular belief we do not have corpses working and springing back to life after the work hours. 


If we need to use the word balance then we need to find two terms that are mutually exclusive, that fit into the ‘either’ ‘or’ situation.  If we try Life-Death balance, it does not make sense; or if we state ‘work hours’ ‘non-work hours’, though it is technically correct, does not seem right.  We are essentially trying to bring in proper perspective to the overall prioritization of ‘life hours’ to be used at work as well as outside work.  But ‘work’ is a subset of ‘life’, so a better option would be to keep the hours spent at work to be in sync with the total life hours.  So keeping the work-life phrase, we can replace the word balance with harmony to convey what exactly we are trying to achieve.
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One earns ‘salary’ for the ‘work’, and since it is easier to measure the time spent, most of us identify the reward ‘salary’ with the work time spent.  If one realizes that the ‘work time’ is a subset of ones ‘life time’ they can see that the salary is the reward for one spending a part of their ‘life’.  Life time has begun its count down the moment one is born.  If I know the purpose of my life and the spending is towards that purpose, I will not feel frustrated about spending.  So if my work is in sync with the purpose of my life, any time spent at work is not going to be a drain and as such getting rewarded for that spending only gives me more satisfaction.  Hence it makes all the more sense for me to look for a work that is in harmony with my life - which can incidentally address all my frustration about compensation for my work time.
The question ‘have I earned my salary?’ suddenly becomes much more involved - like ‘have I spent my life towards earning the rewards, achieving the purpose of my life’.  The impact of the change is great - both in terms of the value one would look for as well the weight one would assign for the question.  It is no longer a dollars and cents question, but has a spiritual side as well over the materialist aspect.  When one relates the number of hours spent at work and decide on whether they ‘earned’ the salary - the employer in a way conveys that ‘your life is not relevant, your hours spent at work is relevant’, and the employee conveys ‘I have to spend these hours for the money but my heart/soul is not part of it’.  In short, this is a sub-optimal situation on both sides.

Historically the word ‘professionalism’ is defined to segregate the ‘personal life’ from the ‘work life’, creating an artificial segregation.   Wikipedia has listed few criteria to define ‘professional’ of which the first one states: “A professional is a person that is paid for what they do. Qualifications have little to do with being a professional.”  General perception is that a ‘professional’ should keep their personal feeling, emotions out of the work and just focus on what was expected of them for the remuneration.  If the ‘professional’ realizes that they are spending a part of their ‘life’ at the job, do they want to keep their personal feelings and emotions out of the same?  It is like expecting one to live as they are only in certain hours and not in certain hours, which is very artificial and frankly not possible.  Margaret Hefferman  in her recent book ‘ cites such artificial separation as one source of blindness.  (Willful Blindness: why we ignore the obvious at our peril’ - Margaret Hefferman: “...it struck me that one source of our blindness at work is the artificial divide between personal and working lives”)
If I am thinking about the work issue and potential solutions when I am in my bath, does that count as ‘working and am I being paid for that time’?  At work if I am thinking about picking up my shirt from dry cleaning. should I be paid for that time at work?  While the answer for these questions may be one should not spend the work hours for personal things and you have to lean how not to ‘think’ about work, then we know it is artificial and not practical.  Trying to enforce this between an employer and employee only increases the friction.  If both employee and employer recognize that the reward is for spending part of their ‘life’ towards a common goal - one from the organization point of view and the other from the employee ‘life’ point of view, these frictions can be reduced, if not fully eliminated.
These days I am no longer looking for ‘balance’ - but trying to feel if my work is in harmony with my life!