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| No One Cares About Your Free Time But You |
November 10, 2003 |
By Mark Stuyt
Technology has blurred the traditional lines between office and home and work and leisure, and in so doing has challenged us to accept greater personal accountability for maintaining a balanced lifestyle.
Corporations have begun issuing alwayson communication devices like the Palm and BlackBerry, en masse, to enable realtime access to corporate information.
They’ve gambled, astutely, that employees with ubiquitous access to email will engage and respond to work requests, regardless of the time of day or night.
And they guessed right. Beyond just PDAs, organizations are increasingly deploying business applications over the Internet, enabling all employees with a home PC and broadband services (or dial up and the patience of a saint) to access their office environment 24/7. Throw in a wireless router from your friendly neighbourhood computer retailer and presto, your house becomes your office. Clearly these business tools empower employees to be more effective, but at what cost?
A balanced lifestyle is essential to maintaining sustainable productivity.
Revised extended health and benefits programs now endorse a host of progressive new services that include acupuncture, massage, personal coaching, naturopaths, nutritionists, online anonymous counselling and health club memberships.
Philanthropic management teams didn’t expand these costly programs through random acts of kindness; the change resulted from a growing body of research
that links the physical and emotional well being of a corporation’s workforce to its productivity and profitability. Yet while one corporate arm understands the financial benefits of free time to a healthy, balanced employee community, the other is simultaneously accessorizing it with a smorgasbord of bleeding-edge gadgets in hopes of rooting out untouched units of productivity. Unmanaged, these productivity tools chip away at the few remaining moments of solitude we have left between conference calls, proposals, corporate travel, expense reports, business plans, customer visits and briefing documents.
COMPETING GOALS
Given that each corporate arm is acting on legitimate, sound business strategies that align with corporate growth and profitability objectives, the accountability falls squarely on employees to maintain the balance that allows them to operate at peak (or near peak) performance, without sacrificing their souls in the process.
As family and work priorities shift and evolve, balance becomes elusive. By virtue of reading this magazine I suspect your laptop is a familiar sight around the house most nights and weekends, you find the intrusive vibration of a BlackBerry too seductive to ignore and you’ve entertained redirecting personal e-mail to your corporate address to ensure it’s viewed in a predictable and timely manner. More importantly, if you buy into the belief that life experience is moreimportant than life accomplishment, and yet find yourself negotiating (internally) every Friday afternoon over which weekend activities can be compressed to accommodate your unfinished workload, then something clearly has run amok.
Until you fall upon that elusive “perfect” job that weds your passion with your ability to generate a desirable income, I suggest you commit to leaving your laptop at work two nights a week, restrict Web surfing at home to topics that feed your curiosity (not your bank account) and switch your BlackBerry’s vibrate feature off when you pull out of the parking lot at the end of the day. With this pattern in place, start to systematically work your way through every last offering your benefits program allows. Bare your soul to the e-counsellor; schedule an exploratory trip to the naturopath for a cleansing dose of dirt, roots, herbs and twigs; ink a weekly massage into your schedule (on company time) then gleefully wait for the reimbursement cheque to arrive in the mailbox. While it may take some time to release the guilt that accompanies your newfound balance, I suspect you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the positive impact it has on your work.
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