There was an interesting piece on GMTV yesterday morning questioning whether people were getting their work-life balance right or wrong. Check out their article here http://www.gm.tv/articles/36522-work-life-balance.html
Whilst there are some interesting suggestions in the article – People confiding in colleagues more than partners and people spending more time planning their annual review rather than a romantic dinner at home etc – what was much more poignant for me was the conversation between Penny Smith and ‘The Apprentices’ Phillip Taylor.
As part of their conversation Phillip said to Penny something along the lines of ‘Is it any wonder that people are spending more time at work – because of the climate I would want to show my boss how committed I am’ (sorry if I haven’t quite got the words exact, but the gist of it was:
Current Climate + More Hours at Work = Shows you are a committed employee and your boss will recognise that.
This is something I am experiencing in lots of organisations I am visiting at the moment.
It’s an interesting one – managers don’t seem to be expecting people to work longer, but employees seem to be doing it off their own back… and the biggest thing for me is, how come people are more focused on doing extra hours at work as opposed to working out how they can increase their contribution for the same amount of hours.
If you were a manager would you rather people focus on the overtime they could be doing or how they can maximise their contribution in their normal working hours?
And if you are a manager, how can you encourage this rather than having staff doing unnecessary (and often unpaid) overtime which then has a detrimental impact on their work-life balance.
As we know, if peoples’ work-life balance isn’t right they won’t be able to perform at their best…
So top tips would be:
· Notice – Have you noticed an increase in the time your people are spending at work
· Question – Ask yourself if the extra time is increasing your people’s contribution
· Talk – Talk to your people and ask how their work-life balance is (Use solution focused scaling questions to explore how it could be improved with no impact on the business)
· Coach – ‘A Managers job is to get results through people’… so coach your people, have regular conversations to stretch performance and recognise their contribution.
· Check – Check your Work-life balance… are you getting it right (sometimes we can fall into the trap of being busy for being busys sake… so make sure your time at work is spent fully contributing to the business and your time at home is dedicated to you and your home life)
Enjoy the ride!
Thanks to www.gm.tv for inspiring this blog!
Carly
Great points Carly – spending time at work when you’re not making a contribution isn’t going to do anybody any favours in the long run. There is a trend at the moment to offer unpaid leave rather than redundancy if workload drops due to a fall in customer demand. This is a great way for people to get a bit of balance back – longer holiday to coincide with kids off school has proved very popular. But I was also listening to a radio phone-in where lots of people were complaining of reduced hours but no reduced workload making many people feel they had no choice but to work in their time off. So my addition to the above is to check whether you are simply asking too much of some people. Help where you can by streamlining processes with reducing your quality of service. And recognise the extra effort and reward with time off when you can before people burn out. Long term absence due to stress is never cost effective!