Many of us think we’re working too hard and too long and we don’t like it anymore. But a focus on work-life balance alone may miss the point.
Australian full time employees work an average 44 hours a week, helping Australia top the list of 23 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries with the longest full-time working hours among employees. Many people in corporate Australia work much longer hours than the average however. Given that many jobs are task-based rather than time-based, they stay at work until the job is done or take it home and do it on the weekend.
Not everyone likes it. Researchers working on the Australian National University’s decade-long Negotiating the Life Course project say about 50 per cent of middle-aged men want to work fewer hours. They are trapped into thinking that they need to work long hours to have a good career and provide for the family, researchers say.
The Brits aren’t big fans either apparently. A team of researchers from Coventry University teamed up with The Work Life Balance Centre, and found that 25 percent of the people questioned by experts confessed that they were too tired for sex.
The study further revealed that the stress from work also affected their lives outside the bedroom. More than 40 percent of the 3,000 people interviewed suffered from depression and 35 percent of them said they had panic attacks.
Work-life balance - what is that anyway?
Judy Martin, the New York Work Life Examiner, says that work-life balance is more a “journey of evolution” than a state of being. Her Work Life Inquiry defines the problem through what might be missing.
1. Have you sacrificed family time for work?
2. Have your personal friendships suffered due to work?
3. Do you favour work above spending personal time?
4. Are you dissatisfied with your weekly achievements at home and at work?
5. Do your core working relationships need some attention?
6. Do you wish your job were more fulfilling?
7. Do you desire change but don’t have time to make it happen?
8. Do your working conditions need a tune up?
9. Do you wish you were more engaged at your job?
10. Do you have a stress reducing routine or practice at work?
This list is useful but the definition proposed by CEO and trainer Jim Bird from worklifebalance.com seems to crystallise what these questions point to: “meaningful daily achievement and enjoyment in each of my four life quadrants: work, family, friends and self”.
Jim says: “You cannot get the full value from life without BOTH achievement and enjoyment. Focusing on achievement and enjoyment every day in life helps you avoid the “as soon as trap”, the life dulling habit of planning on getting around to the joys of life and accomplishment “as soon as….”
Maslow may have the key
While Jim’s definition will work for many, it won’t hit home for everyone. The reason could be found in the hierarchy of needs proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation.
After the ‘deficiency needs’ have been met, Maslow argues that people are ready for self-actualisation: “the desire for self-fulfilment, namely the tendency for him [the individual] to become actualised in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming”.
With this in mind, here’s an alternative work-life balance definition:
“Expressing myself in ways that support me financially, while at the same time nourishing my physical and spiritual being.”
Too woo-woo? Let’s ponder it.
Down shifters and tree-changers - are they telling us something?
In 2003 the Australia Institute published the results of a survey that showed that almost a quarter of Australian adults have downshifted. Follow-up focus group research revealed that there were four key reasons why they took that step but it’s perhaps the first three that are most relevant here.
The Getting a Life - Understanding the downshifting phenomenon in Australia report says that the first reason is “a desire for a more balanced life”, the second a “clash between personal values and those of the workplace”. The report says that: “The third reason, related to the first two, is the search for a more fulfilling life. As one interviewee put it, they want congruence between what they do in the world and what they are in themselves. This is usually the result of a slow realisation over several years”.
That statement resonates with me. It seems to strike at the heart of why the phrase work-life balance may never feel quite right even though it is a buzzword of the moment. Perhaps better shorthand may actually simply be the dilemma of the balanced self.
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