Work-life balance is old school!

This one is from me folks. This is how I feel right now and I have felt like this for the last couple of years. This was not suggested by anybody, it was a pure random thought from a road run. I have felt like this before my Agile journey and having been on this journey for a while. I think I now have enough affirmation to make this commentary so I hope you will come along with me on this and please bear with me.

I have been selling my labor to different industries for a while now, different companies, different cultures, and different continents. I have worked in societies where having a job may be the difference between dying of hunger or not. I have also worked in economies where it is not hard to get a job (relatively) and you can still pursue a job as something you really want, like a calling. 

For the many years that I have been working, I was lectured on how it is important to have a “work-life balance” and for many years I have considered myself a failure because I believed what people said, that I was stealing my personal and family time by doing work that I was not supposed to. Believers of work-life balance are good at time boxing their workday and when you go beyond that they like calling it “overtime”. The said “overtime” is either paid or unpaid. Some companies then say if you want to be paid overtime you need pre-approval. Some say if you are a manager you work “overtime” but you do not get paid for it, it is part of the job.

I have always loved what I do, sometimes I think I am passionate and in some cases I think it is an obsession because It sometimes goes beyond passion. I would like to believe this obsession comes from my humble beginnings. I was born in an economy where working in IT got me out of environments I did not want to be in. I was fascinated by my job from day 1 and regardless of my successes as well as failures, the fire in my belly has really never been put off.

My wife and I met when I was working for a large organisation that offered me the modern world on a silver platter. Going to work has always been fun so I have always been the first one in the office and the last one to leave. Initially, I did this for a couple of reasons:

a)      To impress my boss and show that I am hardworking

b)     At some stage, I had no car and had to adjust to public transport cycles

c)      Then it became a traffic issue when the most logical thing to do was traveling outside the traffic peak.

In my first years of marriage, my wife didn’t like this as it did not make sense to her. She then tried to persuade me out of my routines and failed, then tried "shouting" me out of it and also failed. She also attempted some other “dirty” tricks that also failed (I won’t say them here for the sake of my beauty sleep). I would like to think eventually she was at peace with this the day she accepted me for who I am and accepted that my work and my running are also apart of who I am and a significant part of my life as well as hers, by association I guess.

As I became senior in my roles, things started paying off and my past turned out to have been a preparation for the things I needed to deal with. The first time that work-life balance became a major issue was when the Blackberry (phone) was launched and we suddenly started receiving work emails 24/7. Since then we have gotten used to smartphones and the rest is history. We now check work mail at home, on the train, bus, on the toilet seat, waiting to pick-up kids, and sometimes in the pub. Is that a work-life balance issue?

When I was doing some consulting work I remember a friendly debate (with friends) about when one can start charging a client. I would argue that when I wake up planning to go to Company A, my mind starts processing what I plan to do way before I even get into my car and sometimes only stops thinking about what value I intent to add to them way after parking my car from Company A. I would wonder which time I should really charge and whether this was also a case of bad work-life balance? I did not think so.

For years, I then just continued “doing what needed to be done to get the job done” and billed according to the defined process. I did all this while living my life with my successes and failures and never worrying about the work-life balance because I had more successes than failures and got more from my roles. Whenever someone attempted to dissuade me I would say, “what I do is part of the job and MY survival strategy”. I got used to it, my family got used to my occasional late hours and early mornings to work, etc. and things became “normal”. We all genuinely seemed to feel normal about this. To me this was not a problematic work-life balance, it is something I believe has a different name.

Early this year we got the COVID pandemic, very short notice, and with or without a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), companies had to make working from home a reality or they were dead. I would consider countries like New Zealand advanced when it comes to flexible working hours, in particular remote work but even they had some companies having to put up with accelerated digital transformation to enable work from home.

When this work from home started, we did an analysis of the volume and quality of work that our teams were producing and we came to the conclusion that at worst it was the same and in many instances, some teams had more outcomes. We also kept checking in with teams on the welfare of the people and the consistent answer was people worrying more about COVID-19 than working from home as a concept. There were also some exceptional cases where some people overworked when the country was on Level 5 and there was nothing else to do. During that period some people resorted to working as a clutch. Could this then qualify as a work-life-balance issue? 

These days we also have a lot of what people call “gig” work. Short term contracts, on a specific value, paid for but usually delivered from God knows where. People are living their life, they get work done and get paid for it. Their work is one of the many things they do and I haven’t heard a lot of work-life-balance issues from these people like I used to hear about back in the day. What is changing?

Before I explain what I think this is, I have another scenario. Recently I had to explain a leadership role to some aspirants and one of the things I had to do was to explain that some leadership roles are sometimes a lifestyle, not just a timeboxed gig:

a)      Sometimes you work late or too early and those in your life may have to understand that

b)     Sometimes there are no real working hours, there are just things you need to do on weekends, nights, or holidays.

c)      I called it a survival tactic in my early professional life but it is really now commonly accepted as normal and very few companies will be too keen on giving you a leadership role if you are inflexible with your personal time

I am also big on people with an entrepreneurial mindset. I find these people very flexible, streetwise, and get things done, with no excuses. I love how entrepreneurs are goal-oriented and they seem to not complain too much about work-life-balance because everything seems “normal” to them.

As I said right at the beginning of the article, I had a lot of guilt at the beginning because that was an era of the work-life balance movement and I resisted it as well as “survived” the forces. Over the years I would like to believe I went beyond surviving, I have thrived.

I would like to therefore believe we are past work-life-balance. We should now focus on WORK-LIFE-INTEGRATION. My work is part of who I am and I have embraced that. I do what I do not because someone is looking at it or I want to be praised for it, I do it because I believe in it. It is the right thing to do and I am connected to it. As a leader, I refrain from initiating activities that I have no conviction on. I have done so previously and it never ended well. I use common sense most of the time. If I have to do something with my family and none of my work activities are critical at that time, I simply focus on my family. If there is a production issue (major system issue shutting down the business) and dinner in front of me, the choice is simple, I do what I need to do about the production issue then dinner next or I do both. My whole family ecosystem is comfortable with it now (but it’s been a long journey of ups and downs). They are comfortable because I am honest about it and they now TRUST how I allocate my time between work and family.

One of the things I like about WORK-LIFE-INTEGRATION is that everything becomes normal and you don’t walk into the office to face a “ton” of surprises. At this stage, you know exactly what’s in store and what needs to be done when and by who. WORK-LIFE-INTEGRATION is not about overworking. It is simply doing what you can practically do WHEN YOU CAN DO IT and being content. If completely separating your work from your personal life makes you happy and successful, then go for it.

If Agile is big on happy and productive ecosystems in teams then it is important for individuals to be content with what they do so they exert positive energy to their colleagues. I believe WORK-LIFE-INTEGRATION is a level after work-life-balance, it is therefore a form of maturity. This resonates very well with me and looks at both my work and my life positively. The same way an entrepreneur treats their business as part of their family, like a child or pet.

 This is why I believe we are past work-life-balance, the next best thing is WORK-LIFE-INTEGRATION