The Juggling Act

by Jenna Schnuer
March 2007

The photo said it all. Meg, then in kindergarten, had soaking wet hair and wore a shirt with a big spot on it. “Picture day sneaked up on us,” says Meg’s mother, Marcia Call, president of Alexandria, Va. based McKinley Marketing Partners. “I really didn’t do a good job at all that year of plotting the family calendar with my work calendar. I happened to be out
of town, so my husband was in charge of getting Meg ready. When the pictures came, I couldn’t believe it.” Now that picture, snapped six years ago, serves as a reminder: “If you can’t make it to picture day, something is totally out of whack.”

Thanks to globalization, increased competition and an ever growing selection of mobile technologies that make it easier for business to creep into home life and vacations, an out-of-whack work/life balance has become, to a degree, the new normal. “There’s a whole different expectation that now you are available and you will respond. In the old [pre-mobile technology] days, you had a great excuse for not getting back to people—and it was real,” says Roberta Chinsky Matuson, principal of Human Resources Solutions.

Adds Mike Song, coauthor of The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your E-mail Before It Manages You (Berrett-Koehler, 2006): “[Email] has been a creeping problem. Because of wireless technology and volume increase, it has crept into those little pockets of time outside of work. Twenty to 30 percent of business email is done after hours.”

This trend doesn’t bother everyone. “I think the groups who are most concerned with their work/life balance are in
supervisory and middle management positions,” says Paul Sanchez, global director for employee research at Mercer Human Resource Consulting. “We look at that cohort or that demographic and we’ve seen not a precipitous, but a steady decline in how they report the experience of work/life balance.”

Concern over the issue varies around the globe. Through longitudinal and ethnographic research in the United States,
Europe and Asia, Donna Flynn, an anthropologist and user experience strategist with Microsoft’s mobile and embedded devices group, has found that Europeans are the most concerned about keeping work from spilling over into their home lives, with Asians at the other end of the spectrum. “[In] the U.S., we kind of put it somewhere in the middle of that continuum,” says Flynn.

In the United States 15 years ago, these issues were most frequently a key concern for working mothers. That’s changing. Marcia Call says that at McKinley, an interim marketing firm, she’s seeing many more men take themselves off the fast track at big firms in favor of working for themselves and setting their own rules. In Texas, between 35 and 40 percent of marketing specialists with whom the firm works are male. One of the top reasons cited for fleeing the battle for the corner office? Balance.

Assuming this trend continues, the status quo is going to have to change a bit if companies want to compete for—and retain— top talent. “[T]his new generation of employees coming out of chools, they are looking for more of a balanced lifestyle. They are being attracted to companies that allow that,” says Christine Riordan, Ph.D., Texas Christian University’s M.J. Neely School of Business associate dean for external relations and Luther Henderson University Chair in Leadership. “Companies that don’t manage some of this can be impacted in the war for talent.”

Setting boundaries

Although there will always be days where balance is but a dream, experts say it can be achieved—but it takes a little work. Microsoft’s Donna Flynn says people find the most contentment in this arena when they’re allowed to set boundaries. “If we can just provide ways for people to set their own boundaries for when they’re available or when they’re not, or clearly identify what types of people they want to be in touch with at certain times of the day or certain times of the week,” she says, “then they feel less leashed and more liberated by the technology.”

People also have to stop and take a breath before hitting send on an email in the middle of the night or while they’re on
vacation. They need to figure out why they’re doing it, and what message they’re sending along with the email. In other words, individuals who keep working after hours should consider “the unintentional consequences of well-intended acts,” says Kerry Patterson, coauthor of Crucial Conversations (McGraw-Hill, 2002). “The well-intended act is I want to look like I’m being attentive and not allowing the customer to be disappointed while I’m gone for two weeks. Therefore, I will check in every day. Or if I have an idea and think of it in the wee hours of the morning, that way I will capture it. The unintended message is that you’re a goody two-shoes working long hours.”

While there’s no turning back at some companies, most experts say that it can be fairly simple to set boundaries. “It’s
interesting to me how many executives turn to these very extensive programs to get very simple actions accomplished,” says Human Resources Solutions’ Roberta Chinsky Matuson. “You just treat people with respect. Look at companies when a brand-new CEO comes in and the culture is totally different. That person is leading by his or her own style.”

There are two key components to finding balance: the company culture and the employee’s self-management of these
issues.

“Executives need to set an example,” Matuson explains. One simple way to accomplish this goal: Leave at a reasonable hour and, on the way out, say goodbye to your employees to make it clear you don’t expect them to stick around. She adds: “[Executives] have to hold their managers accountable for making sure employees aren’t working insane hours. They can no longer reward those managers who drive their workforces with whips.”

Best practices

We polled several experts for tips on setting rules and putting a little bit of balance back into our lives. The
top-line message? “People are just going to have to stop and ask themselves, What rules am I going to have? Are
they going to allow the electronic media work for them or against them?” says Kerry Patterson, coauthor of
Crucial Conversations. Other suggestions include:

• Turn off technology whenever you can, says Mike Song, coauthor of The Hamster Revolution. Even if you
have to start slowly by, say, blocking off Sunday morning as a no-cell-phone or no-PDA zone, it’ll help.

• Send less, get less. “If you send 20 percent less email, you’ll receive 10 percent less,” says Song. Cut
out the quick thank-you replies, and don’t hit “reply all” unless absolutely necessary.

• Don’t send email on weekends to colleagues who are trying to find their own balance.

• Make your boundaries known. “You have to be very clear in the workplace that, no, I’m not available
on weekends. I have other commitments. When you do that in the beginning and you draw the line, the
expectation can be managed,” says Human Resource Solutions’ Roberta Chinsky Matuson.

• Figure out your own rules—don’t adopt somebody else’s.
“If it’s in the service of relaxation, [taking electronics on vacation] can actually help. You realize OK, I’m not missing anything critical,” says Ben Dattner, principal of Dattner Consulting and professor of industrial and organizational technologypsychology at New York University. “The question is, what’s going to make you more relaxed? Speculating about what
might be piling up in your inbox, or just doing some sort of check?”

Three case studies

See how three individuals readjusted their own personal priorities.

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jenna schnuer is a freelance writer based in New York. Email Jenna at editor@executivetravelmag.com.