The ridiculousness of work-life balance

Warning: this blog contains a provocative point of view.

The term 'work/life balance' has gained incresing currency in the last few years. So much so that it has become a passing bandwagon that many organisations feel the need to jump on. It now has the attributes of pop culture: lots of excitement, little substance and more boxes to tick for HR departments.

But it's a term that, when you step back and think about it, is just plain daft. Why? Because it's just not possible to separate work from life. For anyone that works, work is part of life. Whoever first coined the phrase probably had a laudable aim. I suspect they were striving to describe the balance between a person's working life and their non-working life.

But, laudable as this aim may have been, there's a hidden and dangerous implication. That implication is that there is a defined boundary between work and non-work; that we should bring one version of ourselves to work and keep a different version for non-work. But the psychologists will tell you this causes humans significant cognitive dissonance - the psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously.

We seem to have arrived at this position through the evolution of the discipline we call 'management'. Taylor's early formulation of management was 'scientific' and ever since then we have viewed organisations as machines. We talk about cogs, re-engineering, processing, scaling, layers, inputs, outputs and a host of other similar terms. We have built our organisational models as pyramids and have compartmentalised the work that an organisation does in pursuit of efficiency. But in doing so we've engineered out the very essence of what it is to be human. No wonder there are regular reports of astronomic levels of disengagement and disenchantment in our workplaces. We've just made it hard for people to work there.

So what do we do about it?

We start by adjusting our frame of reference. Instead of seeing the organisation or workplace as a machine, we start to see it as a living, breathing organism. After all, apart form a few buildings, some machinery and a bit of associated kit, our organisations and workplaces are nothing more than a collection of people who work there. And the last time I checked, these were living, breathing organisms.

Then, if we genuinely believe "our people are our best asset", we stop wasting energy on pop culture activity that amounts to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic and instead go upstream to focus on the employee experience. We start treating people as the thinking adults that they are. We take away the myriad of 'control' rules and procedures that we (mistakenly) think keep us out of trouble and instead we trust people. And we put decision-making fairly and squarely in the hands of those at the front line who really, really do know best. This requires the dismantling of most of the management processes we've developed over the past 100 years and the creation of very different organisational models that redistribute power.

I warned you it would be provocative.

But the good news is there are enlightened organisations that are doing (or have always done) exactly this. And the even better news is: not only is their productivity higher and their staff turnover lower, but highly skilled and very talented people are attracted to work for these organisations because it satisfies their fundamental human needs for autonomy, mastery and purpose. Ask them about 'work/life balance' and I reckon they'll just frown at you.

Steve Lungley is an Organisational Development Consultant, Transformational Change leader and Coach. He helps organisations bring about business-critical change. He can be contacted at steve.lungley@sierra-lima.co.uk or +44 (0)7766 711465.