IWD2019 #BalanceforBetter

One day I was sitting in my Clicquot office in New York when a cold call came in from someone in London. The person wanted me to speak to a group of women about “my philosophy.” I took the call. It came at a time when French Women Don’t Get Fat was on all the British bestseller lists, and the caller turned out to represent a speaker’s bureau. Would I give a keynote address for a group of executive women at a conference outside London, a professional development retreat with an emphasis on time-life management strategies? Sounded interesting, so, after some more details and give-and-take, I said yes, with two conditions. One was that they had to serve our company’s Champagne and the second was I would only do it if I could tag it onto the beginning or end of one of my monthly trips to Europe. It worked out.

The group turned out to be from a famous investment banking firm, and the young, bright women there were investment bankers near burnout. Indeed, the purpose of the posh retreat was for the firm to retain some of this high-priced, highly trained talent. Money was not the issue for these women. They were earning plenty but had no time to spend it. Some had country houses and cottages they rarely saw. Ditto kids and husbands. They did not want more corporate perks; even the luxurious retreat complete with spa services was stressful for some of them. They wanted their lives back. And apparently a goodly number were quitting to that end.

The need to find a balance between work life and personal life is not restricted to women, of course, and has become one of the great struggles among today’s workers and working wounded, but it is especially resonant with women. The very expression work-life balance derives from conflicts recorded a generation ago by working mothers in their places of business. “Enlightened” companies such as the one sponsoring the conference and human resource departments increasingly are addressing the topic and exploring solutions because it has become both a recruitment and retention issue, a productivity issue in terms of health-care costs and lost time as well as bottom-line profit and growth return on investment, and it certainly can adversely affect customer service and relations. Moreover, it may well become an overall talent issue in America, as 77 million baby boomers retire versus 44 million replacements in the upcoming generation (though America has always relied on importing talent when needed).

Work-life balance has a lot more to do with you, though, that with your job or company. When the first labor laws for women and children were introduced in the United States, in 1874, the State of Massachusetts fixed an enforceable limit of sixty hours a week. (Many a week I would have welcomed that limit.)

Around the world today, the time people spend at work and at the office continues to creep back to yesteryear, when ten hours a day, six days a week were accepted in agriculture and industry. I don’t believe all those hours today are always productive time, though. (When more women run the show, will there be as many 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. meetings as there are today? I doubt it.) What my executive colleagues in France were doing in the office at 8 p.m. was always a wonder to me. As was the fact that executives in Japan never left the office before their boss did. After a number of years I started consciously going home earlier (though not exactly early), in hopes of seeing my young staff wrap up sooner. There is always more work to do if you want to do it.

Hours in the office, away from home and a personal life, are one thing, but you must add in the time and stress of the commute (I don’t see why you cannot count that pleasure as part of the work cycle), which in New York can easily be an hour or more door-to-door each way, yet doesn’t raise eyebrows. (I know a pair of attorneys who, after twenty years of commuting more than an hour to Manhattan, just bought a one-bedroom apartment near their offices and are astounded at how much of a positive impact it has had on their sleep... and lives.) With the Internet, smartphones, desktop video-conferencing, and other communication technologies, you are seemingly always connected with work, 24/7. Go to a hotel pool in the afternoon and listen to the business deals going on among people who are supposedly on vacation. That’s also a function of the global economy, where international business does not respect local holidays, time zones, or people’s personal lives. (At least twice a year I am awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from someone somewhere who is hard at work and oblivious to the fact that I was asleep.)

Another contemporary factor that detracts from personal time and abets work time is that we lead such complicated personal lives. People with live-in relationships generally have to address the challenges of dual careers to a greater extent than ever before. I know coordinating schedules with my husband is a chess match, and when he’s late or traveling, I too often fall into the mindless trap of more work. Net, net: Sixty hours a week over six days, as I hinted earlier, sounds realistic to me for an executive with significant responsibilities. Not only is it probably too much and unhealthy to sustain for years or decades, the real challenge for most of us in the present is how not to let it grow beyond such a limit, much less reduce it to a classic forty hours over five days. Even hourly workers are pressured to take over-time and exceed that limit – it is cheaper for a company to hire them that to add to the payroll – and then add in their commute time.

Couples have to make an effort at finding balance and the time to be together. Some solutions seem extreme, but they work. I remember sitting with a couple who both travel extensively for their jobs, trying to fix a date for a dinner together, which routinely means two or months out. They pulled out their electronic calendars and started to call out dates and cities where each would be, then apologized and said, “You know, we have to schedule time together months ahead.” No apology necessary; it sounded good to me, and Edward and I quickly sat down and blocked out few days for ourselves. We also knew an extreme case, a brainy and intense woman who worked crazy hours in derivatives at a Wall Street firm. I am not sure why she couldn’t predict her weekends, but she took to the strikingly costly and at times wasteful self-preservation strategy of booking the best suite at a top New England inn at least once and sometimes twice a month for about four months, knowing in advance that she and her husband would make it there perhaps half of the times, and the decision would be last-minute. What about the reservations? Sometimes she had to eat the bill for an unused room, a high price to pay for sure, but worth it and necessary for her to find balance and relaxation. When your relationship is one of your anchors and seemingly the most important thing in your life, you sometimes just have to pay – a form of insurance.

Edward and I had a rule that we would not be apart more than five consecutive days. We set that rule because one or two nights apart became six or seven as our international travel increased, and we found that simple unacceptable. Long separations did not occur all that often, but it meant that one of us would fly to the city where the other person was for a couple of nights, usually the weekend. I remember once coordinating plane flights from different cities to arrive within minutes of one another at adjoining gates in the Phoenix airport. The next forty-eight hours before we each took off again in different directions were more than worth it. I know perhaps it sounds like an unaffordable luxury, but looking back, I remember and value this wonderful romantic “mini-vacation.”

Expensive, yes, and not possible for everyone, but remember, people who are on the road and in the air days and weeks each month build up a treasure chest of frequent flier miles. Happily, staying connected is easier today in the asynchronous digital world of email, voice messages, smartphones, and more. I simply cannot call up Edward and interrupt a business meeting (or, in lots of time zones, his sleep), and vice versa, but maintaining a sort of running blog for two, we are now more connected than ever when we are physically apart (it’s a kind of flip side to the very electronics that can make us feel constantly at work). Not a substitute for seeing and feeling, but helpful in maintaining one’s equilibrium.

If the exigencies of work keep you apart from your loved ones, consider it a prompt to make sure you schedule quality time when you are together. You need to spend time, not money: plan a long walk together, establish a go-to-a-movie night, take a fixed night out each month without the kids…bowling anyone? N’importe quoi.

Corporations and the government have made good progress over the past few decades in embracing real-world work-balance practices, though largely of the family-friendly variety, growing out of the increase in working moms. There are better maternity leave practices (still not good enough), flex-time programs, employee assistance programs, on-site day care and child referral services, better sexual harassment policies and awareness, age discrimination laws, even some work-at-home options and sabbaticals. Still, stress in the workplace is not diminishing, nor is personal time on the increase. It seems to me these policies and practices have little impact on most employees. Look around – the demographic reality is that there simply are not that many co-workers with young children, and while it is great and essential to have built-in protections for them, there has generally been a sympathetic history and tolerance for the special needs of working mothers. That’s not the main problem.

It is not possible to look to organisations for workplace policies to cover everyone’s imbalances. We’ve seen a growth in counselling and training programs in work-life issues, and a steady increase in studies, books, and other online resources. But they all point to the same obvious conclusions: One size does not fit all. Our situations are all (from slightly to vastly) different. Our needs and interests are different. Our hopes and responsibilities are different. You must create the optimal individualized work-life balance strategy for yourself.

By: Mireille Guiliano

From: WOMEN, WORK & THE ART OF SAVOIR FAIRE

*** Underlines are mine, 'to-remembers' and 'to-dos'.