If you walk in to any HR conference or read any HR textbook you’ll see the phrase “work/life balance” tossed around a lot. The idea here is to make sure you and your staff maintain a good separation between work and personal life. Usually this entails making sure people aren’t overworked, giving people time off, flex hours and work from home capability when possible. Anything that helps people keep that balance in check.
But at a recent conference I heard a new phrase, to me; work/life blend. The premise here was that, in the modern era of social media and cloud computing, it’s not realistic to expect employees to completely ignore their personal lives at work, nor will they likely leave their work at the office.
While it may be tempting to block social media sites, monitor phone calls and police your employees to ensure 100% efficiency and productivity, it’s not realistic. Employees will find a way to check their Facebook, update Twitter, or even Snapchat and the like. Maybe it’s in the bathroom, maybe it’s through cunning circumventing of the IT restrictions, but it will happen. Not to mention, what you’re telling your employees with those measures is “I don’t trust you,” and that never ends well.
And similarly, are your employees fully disconnected from work when they leave the office? How many employees login to work email over the weekend, or will check their work BlackBerry after 5pm? Do we expect employees to be responsive outside of traditional work hours?
The idea of work/life blend posits that we should understand that employees are going to be taking care of personal issues during work hours. Employees will arrange personal gatherings, personal appointments, and check on other issues during work hours. Employees will tweet and post to Facebook and use other social media sites. As employers and HR professionals setting policies, we should realize this is going to happen, regardless of policies. And similarly, regardless of official work hours, employees will check work email and do work outside of those set times.
The trick here, to making work-life blend work, is having buy-in from both sides. Employees are already blending work and life during work hours, they’re just hiding it from employers, frantically switching windows from Facebook to Excel when the boss walks by or taking extended bathroom breaks to call and make a doctor’s appointment. And so far most employers will encourage employees to stay late, into their personal time, or check work email on a Blackberry on the weekend. Why should it not go the other way?
About the author
Tom is a young, digitally oriented Certified HR Leader, with a background in global mobility. He’s been blogging for many years, and has been an active Twitter user since the beginning.