Flexible Work is not about Work-Life Balance

Well, it could be. If you want it to. But don’t let anyone tell you it has to be.

I attended a conference last week where one of the speakers talked about how technology is changing the workplace. The presentation at one point moved to virtual teams and the importance of leading by example to make them work. The dreaded word (email) was mentioned:

“Be careful of sending emails late at night. You could be signaling that team members should be available 24 hours a day.”

Yes, agreed, to a point, I’m completely in favour of monitoring our behaviour and when in a position of authority, our behaviour is often looked up to as one to follow.

But then, something along the lines of:

“Watch out for people in the team sending emails at 11.30pm, it might be affecting their work-life balance.”

“Here we go again,” I thought. Another example of trying to replicate the traditional workplace when going virtual, instead of trying to find a different way of working and even, of trying to find a different way of talking about work.

Should We Only Work 9 to 5?

ne of the advantages of incorporating tech into our work is that we can work when it’s more convenient and appropriate, without being bound by those things that have defined when and where we could work in the past. These limitations have been:

Access to equipment (in the case of knowledge workers; others will always have to travel to work to do their jobs).

Access to colleagues.

Access to information.

Yes, this can be a terrible thing. 24 hour access can have a terrible effect on our health – but so can being restricted by the concept that 24 hour access is a terrible thing. (I like the word “terrible” and I’m convinced that we are in the process of seeing this word alongside “remote” as virtual working environments are being set up without much thought behind them.)

If I want to send an email at 11.30pm, why should I feel like I can’t? That might be an ideal time for me to do my work – it’s just that I balance my life with my work in a different way to you. (Others might say, "Why should I 'balance' anything? I prefer 'fusion'!")

Rather than having a conversation about how to achieve work-life balance, why don’t we talk about having some ground rules for working together? I’ll be fine with you sending an email in the middle of the night, if you are fine with me replying when I’m ready to do so the following day.

Or, if you want to send a message that’s not urgent in the middle of the night (let’s define what ‘urgent’ means, by the way), maybe it’s better to post on the collaboration platform. In that way, I can leave my email notifications on during set out-of-office hours, in case emails arrive with truly urgent requests from our colleagues across the globe.

Why We Talk about Work-Life Balance (and how it has nothing to do with work-life balance).

I often think that when we talk about work-life balance we’re trying to address problems like poor working conditions (eg. too much work, not enough staff), unrealistic expectations, lack of sleep and stress.

These are all things we should be addressing. But the problem with talking about “work-life balance” is that our view of when work starts and ends and what life is all about might be completely different.

Why not change the conversation and instead of talking about work-life balance, let’s talk about how we can work together in a way that suits us all. And, dare I say, in a way that makes us happy?

Flexible Work, Flexible Life

Flexible work is about... being flexible. But in order for this flexibility to work for everyone in our team, we need to set some ground rules.

We need to make some norms (unspoken rules) explicit.

We need to spend time defining and reviewing our team process.

We need to make an extra effort to stay in touch.

We need to make our work visible.

“Flexible” doesn’t mean “easy”. But “easy” is not always fun.

PS. Don't just take my word for it. For more on why we should Forget Work-Life Balance, have a listen to this podcast where Jacob Morgan interviews Eric Severson, former Co-Chief Human Resource Officer at The Gap.