Can you really achieve work-life balance when you work in a highly competitive environment; you are concerned about your financial and job security; there’s a lack of boundaries between work and personal life; when your colleagues work on the weekends and get praised for it? Can you really achieve work-life balance without sacrificing career progression?
What is work-life balance anyway?
Work-life balance is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as “the amount of time you spend doing your job compared with the amount of time you spend with your family and doing things you enjoy.” This definition insinuates that work and personal life are two separate entities. Hence, in our minds, this may mean dedicating an equal amount of time for work and life which might not be realistic.
After the pandemic, Deloitte introduced the new concept of Work/Life Integration. This approach blends personal and professional life in a way that is tailored towards each employee’s needs. This might mean doing the dishes while taking a call, finishing admin tasks while watching a movie or even checking emails while queuing at the airport. This concept has its own pitfalls. It may blur the boundaries between work and life and leave an employee burnt out.
In my humble opinion, work-life balance is our ability to fill the buckets of our lives that are most important to us at that particular time. There are instances when we want to grow our career so we invest more time and energy into work. Sometimes we need to shift our focus internally and care for our health and wellbeing. Other moments, our primary concern is family. Priority buckets change over time. All we have to do is continuously evaluate our wants and needs and allocate time and effort accordingly. That is how we can achieve balance on the long run.
In fact, if you ask me, work-life balance is not a metric that can be evaluated on a daily basis. I would suggest to assess it over a period you specify.
Why is work-life balance so important?
Achieving work-life balance has multiple benefits to employers and employees.
Employers may benefit from fostering a culture of work-life balance through a better employee retention; reduced cost- the cost of replacing an employee being 0.5-2 times their annual salary; and stronger brand reputation.
Employees are the direct beneficiaries of a good work-life balance. The latter improves physical and mental health, increases employee engagement and job satisfaction, enhances productivity, boosts creativity -the more diverse activities we engage in, the more we tap into our creativity and contribute towards a transformative thinking- and contributes to greater success.
How can you achieve work-life balance without sacrificing career progression?
Optimize and reduce time spent at work
- Prioritize the tasks that only you can perform and delegate the ones that are not as critical. This will not only save you time but also aid in developing others.
- Join a collective effort to simplify processes to make everyone’s work run smoother. The more complex the processes at work, the more time and effort they consume.
- Increase your productivity to decrease working hours: Research suggests that an average employee is only productive for a total of 2 hours and 23 minutes a day! So, it would be beneficial to increase your productivity during the 8 working hours and avoid doing extra time. To do that, identify the time slots where you are most productive and use them for important tasks that require focus.
- Set boundaries with your colleagues: We often respond to emails, texts or phone calls simply because we can’t say no. There is no doubt that urgent matters need to be dealt with outside of working hours. However, you need to define “urgent” and communicate it to your colleagues.
- Focus on the activities that would actually drive your career forward. We often get dragged into additional projects that provide no added value to our journey. Forget those. I am certain someone else may find them more relevant to their career aspiration. Instead choose the gigs that fit into your development plan. Check out my blog post on Gigs in the workplace.
Be deliberate about your life
- Identify the buckets of your life that are most important to you. You can define your buckets or get inspired by the following: physical health, mental health, family, friends, partner, spirituality, career, finance, fun and leisure etc.
- Prioritize the buckets that are most crucial during this time.
- Evaluate how you are performing on each of your priority buckets. You can either grade them or put smiley faces (I tend to do the latter).
- Identify the habits that you should eliminate, raise, reduce and create.
- Start gradually inserting those habits into your routine.
You CAN achieve work-life balance without sacrificing your career. You just need to be deliberate about it and become the master of your time and energy.
Feature image: Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
Interesting topic and great solutions for achieving work-life balance without sacrificing career.