Work Life Balance - An Ongoing Saga (& How Your HRMS Can Help)

Aah, "Work Life Balance" - the evergreen topic. Back in the late 90s when the email arrived, it was considered "especially relevant" because "now they can reach you anywhere!" Then, in early 2000s the cellphones became prevalent, and oooh that was the killer time - "Now they can call you anywhere!" 2010s - nothing happened of this magnitude and yet, the work life balance was an ONGOING concern. 2020 covid hit, we saw a lot of posts about how it is "so relevant now!" Then, it was return to normal, and it was "so relevant now!" And now we are sufficiently past that, and still, it is "so relevant now".

The generalization here is that this topic will be relevant as long as we work!

So then, is this all gloom and doom, or is there something we can actually do to enforce some kind of WLB?

There are a bunch of HR programs, effort quantifiers, employee surveys and like, and yes, they can all help.

However, one extremely easy to do thing that I have seen extremely helpful to have an organization mind map of who does what in the organization. This can be global document, a set of local docs, or be a part of your HR system (see example below), depending on the scale of the organization. Initially it takes some time to build that "work ontology" out since everyone explains what they do in different ways and in different kinds of detail.

But once that ontology is set, and guidance in place (and even more than the guidance, many working examples in place), things do start to take a consistent shape, and everyone has a sense of what other people work on.

This actually has two outcomes, which are related and mutually supporting, but are different internally.

First one is that you develop some empathy for what the other person does. When I was recently speaking to a "Senior Advisor - Communications" at a research firm, she counted to me no less than 10 different things that she does on an ongoing basis, each of which sounded like a full time job. No wonder, she was justifiably close to quitting.

Second one is that this starts to develop some cohesion in the work responsibilities. When you see someone doing the responsibility that you were going to ask someone ELSE to help with, you immediately think of a better alignment of functions.

(A third outcome is that you figure out that the word "synergy" is not just a buzzword, but let us not count that one here.)

So, then how to create the document work map inside your HR system?

In your HRIS/HRMS/HCM, you can create a custom field called "Key Functions", and make it editable by the employees and HR and set as readable by everyone else.

And finally, you can generate a report with name, department, key functions and make it available to everyone.

In ClayHR, this kind of looks like this. (Of course, this a custom field, so you can set it up your own way.) Now, you may think that this should be one of the standard fields like Job Title, Job Function, Job Family etc. But no, that is not the case here. In this case, we are actually giving the person the freedom to specify what is it that they are truly working on, irrespective of any formal fields like job title etc.

The corresponding report can kind of look like this. Again, this is a custom report, you can just build it in about 5-7 clicks using the inbuilt report designer. (And no, there is never any cost to build yet another report inside ClayHR, or to view them, schedule them, embed them in dashboards, email them etc.)

Does that mean by doing these two smallish things we have settled the age-old Work Life Balance debate? Clearly not. But to quote Peter Drucker, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast". Using an extensible HR software, you can do these "smallish" things, and establish your own company culture. Then you eat strategy. For breakfast.