Work/life integration, instead of balance?
Work/life balance has been a hot topic for decades in the corporate world. The debate has traditionally been focused around getting the right balance between our professional and personal lives, which has often entailed defining a clear separation between the two. However, particularly fuelled by constantly improving technologies, we’re increasingly talking about work/life integration, instead of balance.
This debate is mostly relevant to knowledge workers, people in jobs that can be performed from practically anywhere. We’re seeing more and more people responding to work emails from their mobile devices at night and organising social events with friends on Facebook during normal working hours. Through social networking sites, we’re giving our work colleagues more insight into our personal lives and our friends learn more about what we do for work. The boundary between our work and personal life is no longer as clear as it used to be.
So, what’s the driver behind integrating our professional and personal lives? Flexibility. And with more flexibility comes higher efficiency. By being able to perform tasks at the most convenient time and utilise pockets of downtime we can achieve more overall. The main concern here is how we manage this growing mishmash of interwoven professional and personal things to do. Well, that’s where technology is helping us through improved connectivity and an ever growing range of productivity tools.
To fully subscribe to the idea of work being what we do and not so much where and when we do it, we need to be a lot more outcomes-driven. The idea of getting remunerated based on the hours we clock up is no longer practical if our work and personal tasks are interwoven. As a positive consequence, we will be forced to think more carefully about performance management at work and be clearer about what we are trying to achieve.
Another aspect to consider is how we are all different. To what extend we want to integrate our work and personal life is dependent on our personalities. Not everyone is thrilled by the thought of having the two overlapping, so we must not forget to respect that. For some personalities it could even be counter-productive to have too much work/life integration. Like with everything else, you really need to find out what works best for you, but with the tools and technologies now available a high degree of work/life integration is definitely possible.
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Totally agree. It blurs even more when we realise that the technology we have at home is often higher quality than the technology we have at work. Wouldn’t we be better off working where we have the best tools?