Does your company genuinely care about work-life balance?
Chris Hyland
Co-Founder of The Happiness Index - B2B Entrepreneur | Board Advisor | NED
This week the BBC published a great article that found “More parents now feel under pressure to check their work emails in the evening” and according to a report, “The 2020 Modern Families Index found that 44% of parents check their emails or do other work at night”.
This peaked my attention because this has been a hot topic at The Happiness Index for a while, but more specifically what can we do as an employer to help give clarity to employees around where the specific line is in the battle between work and life. For the record, this is 100% not exclusively to parents, this affects everyone!
Introduction to The Happiness Index and what our vision means
We have a vision at our company called Freedom To Be Human. The reason I love this phrase is because it is hugely open to interpretation and can mean different things to different people (check out our people page for different descriptions). I enjoy watching new starters join the company and find their meaning in what Freedom To Be Human means to them.
To me it is very simple, the role of my company is to create an environment where an employee can bring their best self to work. Everyone is different which means people thrive in different circumstances, so can The Happiness Index offer an environment that adapts to the individual rather than the other way around?
The challenge, always-on connected apps are not aligned to our vision
I love WhatsApp, I think it’s an amazing messenger app and I have used it for many years, but I would also say it is THE very definition of blurring the lines between work & life.
Six months ago, it was my primary communication tool for everything! At times the noise was unrelenting, it might be at 7 am, midday or midnight (some groups were international) but it felt like a constant prodding from WhatsApp to check the latest message. I was part of around 6 work groups, ranging from marketing to a customer group, plus another 5 or 6 community groups, plus family groups, friends’ groups, you name it I was part of it. I am 99% sure this is the same for everyone else, right?
At The Happiness Index, we are HUGE believers in taking sustained time off to bring your best self to work, which I learnt personally in 2018 (Lesson Number 1 in this article). The theory is simple... unless you disconnect, how can you recharge? Reflection is such an important part of personal progression and when people are constantly stuck in the detail it's incredibly hard to think big picture.
With this in mind, the only way to drown out the noise from WhatsApp was to turn off notifications, but this didn’t work because that meant not hearing from friends and family at the weekend (which I appreciate may also suit some people).
The solution, giving clarity to our employees
Like everything we do here at The Happiness Index, we wanted to gather feedback from people on whether they felt WhatsApp was invasive and getting messages late at night, on the weekends or even on holiday was a problem? We found that around 20% of our employees found it invasive, another 30% were open to finding an alternative solution & 50% were happy with WhatsApp.
So, what did we do? We decided to compartmentalise our online work chatter into 3 streams.
- WhatsApp has been abandoned and is for personal use only
- We directed our internal work chatter to an app called Discord (recommended by our internal gamer)
- We moved our community groups to an app called Guild
The result, allowing employees to disconnect from ‘work’
The result has been huge, unfortunately, I do not have any ROI specific cases for you numbers people out there, but you can feel the employee appreciation that wellbeing and giving people the chance to achieve a strong work-life balance is a genuine part of the employee experience.
To quote an employee "I'm really glad we moved away from WhatsApp. It definitely helps keep work and personal life separated on the weekends and holiday time!"
Summary
As a business leader, the question I would pose to my peers is, what are you looking to achieve from your role? If it’s to enable a thriving culture so people can give their best every day then I believe understanding the bigger picture and the potential damage an ‘always on’ messenger app can have needs to be considered.
Ironically enough we have our product called AlwaysOn, but the theory is very different. You should be able to give feedback anywhere anytime, however that insight can be analysed at the convenience of the end-user and you can log out anytime! ??
So that is us, what about you? I would love to hear any other great solutions where there is a genuine attempt to find the elusive balance between work and life?
Executive Coach | Sales Coach & Consultant | Therapist | ??Best Selling Author | ???Podcast Host
4 年Amazing article, only saw this now. These are so small things to change, yet they have a huge impact. Let's connect!
Highway Locality Manager
4 年Is it not a question of trust but what happens when the trust is broken? In local authorities, many middle managers do not fully allow their staff the work/life balance, due to fear of the lack of support from HR when the trust is broken. Poor performance in other words! How can we support them in order to allow the balance to be beneficial for everyone? A digital platform that allows the performance monitoring in a happy way for both? It must be a similar problem In private sector too?
Founder/Advisor/Asset Management
4 年Love this so much. I'm learning quick about how being a new entrepreneur with staff for the first time that it's really hard to strike that work life balance in the "office" if i'm not doing it myself. The problem lies when you're doing what I'm doing it's almost impossible at the beginning to have real balance. I'm really open with my team, there's a zero tolerance for passive aggressive messages, irritation and the blame game isn't something we do. We're all kind to each other, listen to each other and respect that no ones life is all about Arkeo. We have tight deadlines but we're only able to achieve what we can, everything else can wait. Being agile with everything you do helps to manage that balance. I'll be looking into your tips when the team builds out more! Thanks Chris!
McLaren Racing | People Director
4 年Love this article Chris :) I have had to become tougher with myself over the years to not monitor emails whilst I’m not at work and regardless of all the apps and channels available, that is mostly successful when you apply some serious self discipline! The apps and channels are always there so being firm and disconnecting from those, logging out, removing your work email account from your phone when OOO is key. Easier said than done if you work in a business where they all work to an “always on” mantra and you suffer personally and professionally with FOMO! I believe that it is a real 50/50 approach to making this work - employers needs to ensure they’re giving their employees space and downtime in the moments they should be having them which will hopefully start to make it easier for their people to actually do it. Everyone needs the chance to recharge and we must recognise we all do it differently so one person’s right will be another’s wrong. One of my resolutions for the new year and the new role is to not send emails after 7pm to my team unless it’s super urgent. There’s nothing worse than leaving the office feeling good about your day and returning next morning to a stacked inbox from your manager! Will see how I get on????