Call
it work-life harmony, intermingle or integration, but do not call it work life
balance!
To
begin this article, I must define what work-life so called balance is all about,
and the definition can be different for many people, but generally is typically
defined as the amount of time you spend doing your job versus the amount of
time you spend in your pursuit of happiness. The problem is the word balance
creates an illusion that to have it all together it means you would spend an
equal amount of time at work as you would in the other areas of your life. And
that’s the reason why we have so many people, especially women with families, burnout in their quest to finding the so-called unachievable balance.
Why is it important to find a balance anyway?
Finding the right “balance” is
important to maintain an appropriate mental health which is needed to provide with good care to those you serve at work, especially if you are in the healthcare industry. Researchers have
found that healthcare professionals experience stress at higher rates than any
other industry. In fact, studies have taught us that, physicians who have experienced continuous stress at work, have higher incidents of adverse patient care or in simpler terms, mistakes at
work. It comes at no surprise then that provider burnout can increase the rate of
issues around patient safety by doubling the chances of these occurring. Burnout is the way the body responds to the excessive
exposure of work-related stressors (Maslach, et al., 2009). According to
Maslach’s theory of burnout, the cause of burnout is found in the lack of
balance between the emotional demands of a job and rewards for it. The evidence of burnout is seen in the feelings
of exhaustion, the lack of efficacy in completing tasks and feeling
unaccomplished which often leads the employee to emotionally disengage from
their duties.
Now what about your home life? How
is that affected by the inability to find balance? Well, think about it this
way. The average American works at least 40 hours a week and that’s without including
those who end up working at least an additional couple of hours from home. Even
if you don’t sleep well, every adult needs to sleep some time, and while I have
yet to do the research on how much people sleep, let’s assume everyone sleeps 7-8
hours a night. That leaves all of us with a little over 8 hours a day to provide
our families with the quality time they need from us, exercise, take care of
the house and take on a hobby for our mental health. That being said, we didn’t
take into consideration the number of adults who work more than 40 hours a week,
nor did we consider those who come home already exhausted both physically and
emotionally due to the demands of their jobs, or those whose jobs never really
end because even when they are home, they are on-call. Gee, no wonder healthcare
employees ranked among the 6th highest divorce rates of the nation
according to monster.com (These jobs have the
highest and lowest divorce rates) and
are known to report increased
rates of depression and even suicidal ideation (Fond, et al., 2022).
I’d
like to suggest that the term work-life balance is in part what is causing the
most frustration and feelings of un-accomplishment that can potentially
cause the emotional turmoil that may lead to mental health illness. This is
because the term itself suggest that our
work and personal lives exist separately and are continuously competing against
each other for our attention. Perhaps if we stop looking at it as a ‘balance,’
but instead consider the intermingle between the two, we might live healthier
lives.
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A healthier way of referring
to the two sides of someone’s life may be, work-life integration, or as Jeff
Bezos refers to it, “work/life harmony.” It simply means it takes effort to
blend our personal and professional responsibilities harmoniously. By looking
at it from this perspective, work is simply one of the various aspects of our
lives, which needs to be considered alongside other important concerns, such as
our home/family lives, our responsibility in our church/community, and our
spiritual and emotional well-being. The argument I propose is that if we stop dividing
the aspects of our lives, and instead intermingle one another and if we stopped
pretending the scale needs to be in the middle for us to be healthier, by recognizing that the
quest to find the ‘impossible’ might be what’s causing us to fail in the first
place then we might be facilitating a healthier employee. We need to be more realistic and realize that some aspects will require more
of our attention and time at a certain point than others. For example, if I’m a
mom who works at the executive level of a retailing business, I might spend more
time and energy at home than at work, when a child of mine is celebrating a
birthday, and if I’m opening a new store it might require of me to spend more
time and energy at work during that period than at home. This might be considered
a more feasible ‘balance’, and
not necessarily being able to spend equal amounts of time
and energy at home and at work.
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Therefore,
let us consider that achieving a healthy work-life integration or harmony can
not
only potentially reduce stress and improve emotional states but also
increase overall productivity and
employers’ bottom-line. I think this is
the part that most senior leaders do not recognize is critical to
the success
of their organization. Many missed the fact that the employee’s mental health can
and will
impact your success. Mental health is the number one cause for most
long-term absences (Hameed, et
al., 2022). An employee who is often missing out
on work because of their mental health illness will
not perform as efficiently
as one who is at work as scheduled. Burnout is known to be strongly
associated
with increased rates of depression and even suicide, especially among the
workers of
healthcare organizations (Fond, et al., 2022). Understanding this is
important so that we can provide
better health care for patients and for senior
leaders to strategize ways to provide a healthy work
environment and culture
that facilitates an employee's psychological wellness.
The
different ways to look at our professional and personal responsibilities and
considered them to be ‘balanced.’ This too is a healthier well-balanced
employee!
References
Fond, G., Fernandes, S., Lucas, G., Greenberg, N., &
Boyer, L. (2022). Depression in healthcare workers:
Results from the nationwide AMADEUS survey. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 135, 1–10.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2022.104328
Hameed, I., Ijaz, M. U., & Sabharwal, M. (2022). The
Impact of Human Resources Environment and Organizational Identification on
Employees’ Psychological Well-Being. Public
Personnel Management, 51(1), 71–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/00910260211001397
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