People talk all the time about finding the right work-life balance, a concept that was probably relatively unknown before the 1970s. The entire idea is to moderate the demands of work and spend precious time with loved ones, hobbies, or in stress relieving activities. When both parents work full-time jobs, finding the right work-life balance becomes ever more important. I still remember the news media picking up on the concept of "latchkey kids" when I was growing up in the 1980s, and of spending "quality time" with the family in the 1990s.
To get a fuller flavor of the type of hypocritical advice people love to dispense, here are WebMD's tips on securing a better work-life balance. That list is chock-full of a bunch of advice that sounds good on the surface, but which is incredibly difficult to implement in real life.
There is no doubt that men want to spend more time with their families. While women traditionally sacrifice their careers to stay home and raise children, more and more men are choosing the stay-at-home-dad route instead. As odd as it might seem at first, our generally closed-minded society is slowly accepting that men can be decent, responsible caregivers as well. It's true!
There is also no doubt that Americans are working harder than ever these days. Americans take less time off from work, work more hours per work week, and are more productive than any other nation on Earth. We're certainly working harder than Old Europe, what with their labor union-imposed work week restrictions and guaranteed vacations. When's the last time you or a person you knew actually took a two-week or longer family vacation during the summer? We just don't do that these days, instead taking vacation time in smaller chunks in the form of long weekends. We might still get some family time, but everything seems so incredibly busy and rushed these days.
In my own experience, I can say I'm incredibly fortunate to have what amounts to a regular 40-45 hour per week, 8-to-5, white collar, salaried "exempt" employee type of job. Believe me, I didn't know what an exempt* employee was during my time on active duty with the Air Force. For all the benefits the military gives its service members (free gym, discount groceries, free healthcare, subsidized housing, etc.), the pay was set based on your rank and years in service and/or time in grade. How productive you were didn't make a difference in pay, and there certainly weren't any bonuses. While some jobs on active duty are more like normal offices, with standard office hours, what it really meant is that they owned you and could ask you to come in at any time, day or night, often for an exercise and not even a real-world crisis. Even the "normal" office jobs usually had people arrive for work no later than 7:30 am and leave not before 5:30 pm or later, depending on what "emergency" the LtCol had going on.
*Exempt from what? The overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). No overtime for you, pal, you're exempt!
For all the talk (lip service) the Air Force leadership gave to providing a stable work environment and solid support network for service members and their families, the mission always came first. Seriously, the Air Force rated its officers on personality traits to determine whether a leader was more a "mission" or a "people" person. Even those leaders who saw themselves as people focused still spent the majority of their time getting the mission done.
Ah, but I digress. After leaving active duty, I had to find a real job. Yes, civilian jobs usually require real performance to justify the base salary, and if you do a really good job, maybe -- just maybe -- you'll get a bonus at the end of the year. Sadly, even as an exempt employee, sometimes the work requires that extra time at the office to get 'er done.
I constantly struggle on a daily basis with the demands of work and family, and I am certainly not alone. The WSJ has a great blog simply called "The Juggle," and they cover a wide variety of work-life balance issues. They've often mentioned the "walk of shame," and no, we're not talking about college-age women walking back across campus on early Saturday morning, still in their clothes from Friday night. What the Juggle writers refer to as their walk of shame is an employee leaving work at 5:30 pm to spend time with the family. What ever happened to "bankers' hours" being an acceptable work day? They weren't talking about investment bankers, that's for sure.
I do know that I remain incredibly fortunate to have a job that pays well, challenges me to lead and to be creative in problem solving, and which allows me to see my family pretty much on a daily basis. I don't travel that much, I don't have to spend nights and weekends at the office (usually), I don't work the third shift at the hospital or factory, and I get to spend lots of quality time with my family. I'm almost always home in time for us to sit down together as a family for dinner, and how many people can say that these days?
What got me thinking about all of this is not just the quote mentioned above about no one wishing they spent more time at work on their deathbed. In yesterday's WSJ, they had a book excerpt from one of the Journal's contributing editors, Ron Alsop. Here's a block quote from that article titled "The 'Trophy Kids Go to Work":
When Gretchen Neels, a Boston-based consultant, was coaching a group of college students for job interviews, she asked them how they believe employers view them. She gave them a clue, telling them that the word she was looking for begins with the letter "e." One young man shouted out, "excellent." Other students chimed in with "enthusiastic" and "energetic." Not even close. The correct answer, she said, is "entitled." "Huh?" the students responded, surprised and even hurt to think that managers are offended by their highfalutin opinions of themselves.The article goes into great depth talking about the Millennials (creatively defined as the generation born between 1980 and 2001), and how they have such high expectations for themselves and their work places. One common refrain from corporate recruiters apparently is that these kids, just out of college, want to be CEO of the company tomorrow. These kids were raised during the whole self-esteem movement, which awarded participation trophies to every kid who showed up, not just the Little League champions. Of course these kids are special; they've been told how special they are their whole lives; why wouldn't they be special at work?!
The article wraps up by touching the surface of why these high expectations are so ironic:
In the final analysis, the generational tension is a bit ironic. After all, the grumbling baby-boomer managers are the same indulgent parents who produced the millennial generation. Ms. Barry of Merrill Lynch sees the irony. She is teaching her teenage daughter to value her own opinions and to challenge things. Now she sees many of those challenging millennials at her company and wonders how she and other managers can expect the kids they raised to suddenly behave differently at work. "It doesn't mean we can be as indulgent as managers as we are as parents," she says. "But as parents of young people just like them, we can treat them with respect."For me, it all boils down to this: The Boomer generation wants to forget how hard they had to work to get to where they are today. They preach all this "work to live, don't live to work" mantra, and we begin to hope that our bosses could actually be somewhat enlightened in achieving a proper work-life balance. But then they are the ones currently in positions of authority who layer on the work and expect it to get done today. They are the ones who think younger workers who don't pull 60 hour plus work weeks are lazy. They are the ones who shove the message of "Cats in the Cradle" down your throat with one hand while simultaneously squeezing every last ounce of productivity out of a person with the other.
The other thing that falls into this same category is finding work you love, work you're passionate about -- that's what will make you happy working 80 hour+ weeks!!! Almost all the career coaches out there start with a personality profile to decipher what type of work a person really should be doing with their life. I get the idea that a person shouldn't dread coming to work every day, but Mark Twain succinctly said: "Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."
Think about it. Pay is what our employers have to give us in order to perform activities we'd rather not be doing. If every person in the world only did what he or she wanted to do with their lives, things they were really passionate about, who would be the waiters, janitors, or insurance adjusters? That's not meant as a dig on people who fill those needed roles in our society. The bigger picture is that most people, myself included, find ourselves in hard jobs that pay the bills. If we work with people we like, all the better. We find a vocation that we can stand to do, and is something we're good at doing, and we simply do it to put food on the table, a roof over our family's heads, and clothes on our backs. It's probably not the first love of our life, but that is why we have hobbies and activities (a life!) away from work.
Plus, if we all had the jobs that we absolutely loved in this life, we wouldn't get any enjoyment from fantasizing about those jobs we think we'd rather have. C'mon, who hasn't talked over cocktails about the one job a person would love to have? The other day, I discovered my CEO would rather do wood working in his shop, building furniture or all sorts of things. Me? I would be a race car driver.
Just don't lie to me and say that work-life balance, or that finding your niche in life, is all that important in one breath, and come right back and ask for that TPS report in the next. You'll get your damn TPS report.
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