New Life For Work-Life Balance In 2020

We need to decide for ourselves what balance means to us

As I noted in an article in the November 2019 issue of Employee Benefits and Wellness Excellence, the term work-life balance has been around since the early 1970s. The term rose to significance as more and more women entered the workforce and sought to balance their role at work with their role as a wife and a mother.

The biggest challenge with the term work-life balance lies in just what is meant by the word balance and how it is best achieved. No one disagrees that there should be more to life than just work. No one disagrees that survival requires work (effort). The problem is that balance is typically thought of only in terms of time.
 

Thinking only in terms of time is problematic as everyone gets just 24 hours in a day. Assuming 8 hours for work and 8 hours for sleep, this leaves just 8 hours a day for all of the rest of one’s life. How an individual uses those remaining 8 hours will need to vary by individual depending upon their life context. Obviously, all of life’s roles, issues and challenges cannot receive equal time during any one 8 hour time period, thereby making a work-life balance in terms of time alone impossible.  

As a result, over the years, we have seen multiple attempts to replace the term work-life balance with other terms such as work-life harmony, work-life integration, work-life fit, work-life alignment and others. But the term work-life balance has so far survived the different challenges.

In my November 2019 article, I suggested that seeing balance only in terms of time was the real issue. In that article, I suggested that instead of time, the balance needed to be seen in terms of impacts and outcomes.

Now, in the summer of 2020, what a difference a year makes. One of the early lessons learned from the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020 is that many employers and employees have learned that working from home can be successful for many. As a result, many will remain working from home even after the pandemic abates. For many working from home, work-life balance becomes work-life boundaries. Within the home, what are the boundaries between work and life? Boundaries can become blurry, very quickly.

When working from home, work-life boundary issues can include both space and time. How do you balance the need for a workspace that also needs to serve as a living space? When working from home or remotely becomes permanent, due consideration needs to be given to ergonomic health and safety. Working on a laptop sitting on the couch just won’t cut it for the long-term. In the home, what accommodation needs to be made for setting up an ergonomically correct workstation in an effort to avoid musculoskeletal injury?

While work-life balance will never be achieved solely on the basis of time, the issue of time in the form of time creep can be a real boundary issue for the work-from-home-worker. Without having a hard and fast stop time boundary, it is easy to say to yourself that you’ll quit for the day after you do just one more small task. For the work-from-home-worker, this makes work-life balance both a time and a boundary issue. 

As a national certified Work-Life Professional (WLCP), I would suggest that work-life balance is neither intuitive nor easy to achieve. What constitutes “balance” will be unique to each individual. This individuality of balance can create real challenges for employers seeking to create policies and practices related to work-life balance. 

More often than not, there is a huge disconnect between expectation and reality in the workplace, thereby challenging the work-life balance concept. In 2020, I would suggest we focus less on trying to figure out what work-life balance means and focus more on the context and situation surrounding the need for each employee to create their own balance. After all, all work and no play makes both Jack and Jill very dull employees at a time when employers need the whole, mindful person on the job.

As 2020 and the pandemic continue to unfold, I see work-life balance taking on even more significance. Therefore, I don’t think we will see the demise of work-life balance as a workplace issue anytime soon. Each employee must bring the term “balance” to life for themselves in a way that serves them the best.

Since life consists of multiple domains, life is complex and complicated. Life can get messy. So too can work-life balance.

We each need to decide for ourselves what balance means to us. Is it harmony? Is it integration? Is it satisfaction with the impact and outcomes of our efforts? When it comes to achieving work-life balance, most importantly, each employee is the only one who can determine the nature of work-life balance and just what balance means to them.  

Author Bio

As a worksite well-being professional, William McPeck has training and experience in both in worksite wellness and the emerging field of worksite well-being. His professional training includes program development, program implementation, consulting, training and coaching in wellness, mental health and substance abuse. Bill specializes in helping employers and wellness program coordinators launch wellness programs and to enhance existing programs. Bill is also a Certified Worksite Wellness Program Consultant, Certified Wellness Culture Coach, Certified Work-Life Professional and Certified Holistic Stress Management Trainer.   Connect William McPeck