As companies allowed their workforce to telecommute partly or fully and replaced the limitations of nine-to-five jobs with flexitime — giving employees access cards to log in the required number of hours at work any time in the day — the general mood was that of jubilance and relief. Flexible workspaces arrived via Virtual Private Networks, falling cost of laptops, smartphones, superfast broadband lines, intracompany instant messengers integrated into company mail servers such as the Microsoft Office Communicator and webcams. This helped do away with the need to get into an office every day.
Sounds like the perfect recipe for ideal work-life balance, right? However, as many professionals discovered, especially those who had to work across time zones, flexitime and flexispace give a new dimension to soft skills required to maintain a good work-life balance.
Sharon Garrett, a senior communications professional in the UAE, says, "I find that people are less forgiving with response times. If someone knows you're on a BlackBerry or iPhone they expect a response immediately. The secret is knowing when to switch it off or at least to silent and not become a slave to technology."
On one end, while some management teams worry about social networking eating into employee productivity during work hours, at the other is the employee worrying about flexitime and flexispace turning out to be a bane in disguise: responding to email, taking calls and sitting through tele and video conferences at all hours of the day and night. Then there are the progressive employers who view social media as the next bastion of enhanced employee productivity, while progressive employees learn to balance their work-life by weaving in and out of each alternately, finding neither of them intrusive on the other.
Advent of ‘profernalism'
Co-founder of ‘workforce marketing' solutions provider Ajax, Jason Seiden, who advocates "profernalism" as a coming together of our professional and personal lives with the advent of social media, says, "…social media has finally nailed shut the coffin on this myth people like to believe that somehow our worlds can be divided into professional and personal. They can't. They never really could, but communication across the two realms was inefficient enough that we could pretend that they were actually different things.
"Your worlds have collided. Work-life balance is dead. However, that's not to say that you can't achieve work-life balance. You can achieve work-life balance… if you strive for passion and seek quality events in all your activities. The concept of balance changes completely when you juggle passions instead of obligations."
The phenomenon of the growing breed of companies and employees that have started to adapt to this blending of professional and personal for enhanced productivity merits attention. They succeed in this world of constant connectedness by tapping into its inherent advantages. Take my experience working across multiple time zones: I start my work day at 6am at home, break away from it by 8am to go for my morning jog or gym, give my son his breakfast and send him to school before getting ready to leave for work. I would typically be back home by 6.30pm to get some free me-time until 9pm. After that it's time for checking mails and making late-night calls on most days. I often have my Facebook and Twitter on in the background as I work and have a bit of a chat too with friends if not too busy just then. I don't think I could have been either a good mother, successful professional or contented human being in the manner that I am without the technologies that enable us to have flexitime in flexispaces.
From a company perspective, Burton Goldfield, President and CEO of Trinet, an American HR outsourcing firm, says on his blog, "My company and many others use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, as well as internal networks such as Microsoft Communicator and Central Desktop. The goal of internal social environments is to create a collaboration-focused community where teams stop working in silos."
Such companies are not stressing about ‘loss of productivity' due to time spent on social networking sites or creating IT security policies that shut off access. They are letting life balance with work as a natural way of working.
Goldfield says, "The overall benefit is a very streamlined and effective organisation. Companies that adopt these tools are quickly seeing employee engagement, satisfaction and motivation, and in our experience, leading to higher levels of productivity, revenue and profit."
Depending on how well one has learnt skills to cope with life and work or multitask, real-time connectedness can either increase or reduce stress levels. As in every work environment, there are certain kinds of people who would do better than others based on not only their professional qualification and competency but also softer skills. Some of those required now are the same as before, just with increased emphasis and criticality such as better time management, project management, prioritising and adaptability.
Joseph McClendon III, the founder of the Pro-Sequences Research Group, a leading ultimate performance coaching organisation, says, "One must pay close attention to one's health in terms of balance, because without health you are not going to be able to perform at your best; you are not going to be any good to your family, you are going to be of less value to your company and so on." McClendon recently addressed corporate clients in Dubai at a Create your Fate event organised by ME Leaders.
It's not as if having a good work-life balance was easy before the advent of real-time constant connectedness. It's just that we are only now turning the corner on coping with it to make it an advantage — not just professionally but personally as well.
— Gulf News Report
