Work Life Balance: Balancing Life

Work-Life balance is a major topic in today’s business world. Every organization is focused on addressing the issue and there is tons of literature on this topic. There is lot of time spent thinking about solutions to improve work-life balance. Are we successful? Do we really understand what work-life balance is?

I have fundamental issue with the word ‘work-life’ balance. This tends to indicate that work is not part of life.

·         How could we define a place, where we spend majority of adult, active life as NOT LIFE?

·         ‘Work-Life balance’ tends to indicate a mindset that we need to minimize work as much as possible so that we can have life

·         This is in contrarian to the Organization goals to maximize output from their employees to improve overall profitability (nothing wrong by the way. That’s why organizations exist – to maximize profitability)

·         Hence, this denotes continuous conflict between Organization and its employees. Not a great state to be in.

·         Most employees tend to look for alternatives, jump from company to company, in search of ideal work-life balance but they fail to achieve it.

The above denotes that we can never achieve work-life balance as the interests of the Organization and its employees are in conflict. But is it true? Can we not achieve work-life balance? In my mind, we are looking at the problem in the wrong way. Problem is not about achieving work-life balance but in achieving right balance in life. Work is part of life and hence if we achieve balance in our life, our goal will be achieved.

But, how do we achieve balance in life? The only way to balance life is if all our needs are met. Every Human being have needs that could be categorized as follows: Intellectual needs, Emotional needs, Physical needs and Spiritual needs. If we balance our life against these needs, we can achieve the desired balance in life.

·         Everyone has different levels of needs. It is possible that a person has higher intellectual needs while another could have higher spiritual needs. Also, it is important to note that these needs tend to vary over a period of time. For example, as a young person, you may not have much of spiritual needs but by middle age, you may see this need emerging.

·        Our needs could be met at different places. Typical thought process is that intellectual needs are met at office, while emotional needs are met at home. This may not always be right. It is possible for office to cater to emotional needs if you have close friends or social circle in office while intellectual needs could be met at home while pursuing a hobby/activity. A case in point – we do tend to see that sometimes people leave a company to go to another company when their close friends move. This is predominantly to sustain their emotional needs.

·        It is also important to understand that we cannot achieve the desired balance of the needs every day. At the same time, if it takes more than a year to achieve balance, it’s a shame. How many times did we hear the adage – ‘we spend our health to achieve money and then we spend money to regain our health’? Hence, it is important to define a timeframe within which we would like our needs to be balanced. It could be weekly, bi-weekly or monthly – whatever appeals to you.

Having said the above, I’d ask you to follow the below process:

1.      I’d like you to think through what your intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual needs are. Having identified those needs, allocate points out of a maximum of 10 points, for each of the needs. The total points across all the needs should be 10. If you think you have higher intellectual needs than emotional needs, please allocate more points to intellectual needs. It is ok to allocate zero points to a need. For example, if you decide that you do not have any spiritual needs at this point in time, please allocate zero to that need.

2.      Figure out where these needs are being met. For example, we have different segments in our life – Office/Work, Home/Family, Parents, Friends, Hobbies/Activities, College/Education (if you are pursuing), Colleagues, etc. Determine what needs are being met by each segment of your life and to what extent. You could use the table listed below (illustrative) to capture this data:

	Intellectual needs <x1/10 points>	Emotional needs <x2/10 points>	Physical needs <x3/10 points>	Spiritual needs <x4/10 points>
Office/work
Home/Family
Parents
Friends
Hobbies/Activities
Education
Colleagues
Charity/Social work
… (Any other aspect)

3.      Do validate and see if your needs being met are in line with the priority that you have assigned to them. Also, are they being in the right proportion and in the right places? If not, there is opportunity to balance them. For example, if your intellectual needs are high and they are not being met at work place, you should see if they could be met through hobbies or through friend circle that you have. If not, it is important to address it – either by changing the workplace (if the organization is not providing those opportunities to you) or by changing the career (if there are no way you can meet your intellectual needs in your line of work).

4.      Create an action plan (based on the above) to bring changes in your life and segments that would help you to balance your life much better, by meeting the priority of your needs

5.      Review the action plan and see the average timeline in which your needs are met. Is the timeline congruent with your demand? If not, go back to step 4 and re-do the action plan so that the timeline could be closer to what you desire.

If we can move away from ‘work-life balance’ to focus on balancing our overall life, we will be happier in our lives and more content with the outcomes.

Given the above, how do we deal with the work component of our life? We need to think beyond money from work. If workplace is catering to your multiple needs like Intellectual, Emotional, Physical etc., then feel free to spend more time at work – as it will fulfill both your needs and monetary aspects. However, if the workplace does not fulfill any of your needs, you need to seriously examine how much time you want to spend at workplace or more importantly, should there be a need for a change either in workplace or your career.

What do you think? Could we address the work-life imbalance by balancing our life? Is it practical? Would you do it?