With that in mind, here are some suggestions for what leaders can do to help their teams thrive: • Be a good role model for work life balance, because the leader’s work-life balance has a big impact on your team members’ work-life balance. • Encourage all employees to use vacation time (and not work while they’re gone!) and take vacation yourself. Research strongly supports the idea that truly disconnected vacation time is critical for staving off burnout and increasing employee productivity. • Help employees feel that they can disconnect, by designating someone else they can put on their out-of-office messages, and maybe even allowing them to have emails deleted while they’re gone. • Decide on your company’s “communication hours,” and strongly discourage team members from sending work-related messages to one another outside of these hours. Designate a specific channel, like text messages, to use for emergencies outside of these communication hours. As a leader, you play a critical role in the company culture. While ultimately, work-life balance is up to employees, it can’t be evaluated in a vacuum, and the company culture will shape the employees’ attitudes and behaviors. Work-Life Balance Is Up To Individuals: While it might seem like this headline conflicts with the one above, it’s true that the team’s work-life balance is the responsibility of both leaders and individuals. So below are several ways you can preserve enthusiasm for your work and reduce your own risk of burnout as you head back to the office—whether you’re reporting to the office every day or just for a few hours a week. If you work at a demanding company, you might feel defeated, and like you have no choice but to work ever-longer hours. However, you probably do have some degree of choice in how often you work, and even where you work. How Often You Work: If your work depends on your brainpower, then giving your brain the downtime and stress reduction it needs might help you become better at your job and get more done in less time. So, back off a little bit, take better care of yourself, and see what happens. You might be surprised at the results. Also consider if you have room to learn how to get more done in the same amount of time by better managing your attention and your responsibilities. How You Communicate: So many knowledge workers make the mistake of viewing email as “the thing you squeeze in between ‘real’ work.” But many of my clients can spend more than 3 hours a day simply responding to email! So, email, as well as other forms of communication, is absolutely real work and deserves to be treated as such. Carve out time in your schedule for email. Know that communications never end, so when it’s time to process your email, take twoimportant steps: Once you’ve addressed a message, move it out of your inbox. Use your email inbox only for receiving and processing messages, not for storing them. Work in offline mode. You will never be “done” with email, but you can be “done for now.” Where You Work: The pandemic has tightened many segments of the job market, so if you are qualified to work in one of those segments, you might have opportunities to move to a company that puts a higher premium on work-life balance. Sometimes, the grass really is greener somewhere else. Before you allow yourself to feel “stuck,” fully explore your options. Remember, though, that if you are the primary driver of your long work hours, those habits will follow you wherever you go. Business Hours Can Be Individualized: In the new normal, we need to be deliberate about when we are working and when we aren’t. Going forward, different teams may work different business hours, and that can work. And freelancers and contractors may set their own business hours. What’s important here is not which hours are working hours, but that all hours are not “business hours.” Companies who want the happiest, most productive employees need to cultivate a culture that respects their workers’ time off. They must also help them define when they need to be available, and when they don’t. Question: 1) What has research shown is a problem with working “too many” hours in a week (e.g.,more than 50 hours)? Why, in your opinion, is it important to recognize these findings?
With that in mind, here are some suggestions for what leaders can do to help their teams thrive:
• Be a good role model for work life balance, because the leader’s work-life balance has a big impact on your team members’ work-life balance.
• Encourage all employees to use vacation time (and not work while they’re gone!) and take vacation yourself. Research strongly supports the idea that truly disconnected vacation time is critical for staving off burnout and increasing employee productivity.
• Help employees feel that they can disconnect, by designating someone else they can put on their out-of-office messages, and maybe even allowing them to have emails deleted while they’re gone.
• Decide on your company’s “communication hours,” and strongly discourage team members from sending work-related messages to one another outside of these hours. Designate a specific channel, like text messages, to use for emergencies outside of these communication hours.
As a leader, you play a critical role in the company culture. While ultimately, work-life balance is up to employees, it can’t be evaluated in a vacuum, and the company culture will shape the employees’ attitudes and behaviors.
Work-Life Balance Is Up To Individuals: While it might seem like this headline conflicts with the one above, it’s true that the team’s work-life balance is the responsibility of both leaders and individuals.
So below are several ways you can preserve enthusiasm for your work and reduce your own risk of burnout as you head back to the office—whether you’re reporting to the office every day or just for a few hours a week.
If you work at a demanding company, you might feel defeated, and like you have no choice but to work ever-longer hours. However, you probably do have some degree of choice in how often you work, and even where you work.
How Often You Work: If your work depends on your brainpower, then giving your brain the downtime and stress reduction it needs might help you become better at your job and get more done in less time. So, back off a little bit, take better care of yourself, and see what happens. You
might be surprised at the results. Also consider if you have room to learn how to get more done in the same amount of time by better managing your attention and your responsibilities.
How You Communicate: So many knowledge workers make the mistake of viewing email as “the thing you squeeze in between ‘real’ work.” But many of my clients can spend more than 3 hours a day simply responding to email! So, email, as well as other forms of communication, is absolutely real work and deserves to be treated as such. Carve out time in your schedule for email. Know that communications never end, so when it’s time to process your email, take twoimportant steps:
Once you’ve addressed a message, move it out of your inbox. Use your email inbox only for receiving and processing messages, not for storing them.
Work in offline mode. You will never be “done” with email, but you can be “done for now.”
Where You Work: The pandemic has tightened many segments of the job market, so if you are qualified to work in one of those segments, you might have opportunities to move to a company that puts a higher premium on work-life balance. Sometimes, the grass really is greener somewhere else. Before you allow yourself to feel “stuck,” fully explore your options. Remember, though, that if you are the primary driver of your long work hours, those habits will follow you wherever you go.
Business Hours Can Be Individualized: In the new normal, we need to be deliberate about when we are working and when we aren’t. Going forward, different teams may work different business hours, and that can work. And freelancers and contractors may set their own business hours.
What’s important here is not which hours are working hours, but that all hours are not “business hours.” Companies who want the happiest, most productive employees need to cultivate a culture that respects their workers’ time off. They must also help them define when they need to be available, and when they don’t.
Question:
1) What has research shown is a problem with working “too many” hours in a week (e.g.,more than 50 hours)? Why, in your opinion, is it important to recognize these findings?
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