There is, of course, no such thing as ‘work-life balance’.
This is because work is a state of mind. If you are mowing your lawn on the weekend you are unlikely to think of this as ‘work’ – though it may look like work to someone else. Today is Sunday. I'm writing this article. I don't think of it as work.
In essence, if you are doing something you want to do, you probably don’t think of it as work. Sadly, many people are not doing what they want to do – and as a result they start to delineate periods when they are doing what they want to do from periods when they are not. So far, so obvious.
What’s interesting to me is the degree to which organisations unnecessarily turn life into work; systematically reducing engagement and productivity in people who actually want to do their jobs – people who might otherwise not distinguish ‘life’ and ‘work’. People who have a sense of purpose.
Imagine yourself mowing the lawn when someone interrupts you and says ‘mow that bit over there first’, ‘now use this mower’, ‘now stand still for ten seconds’. Pretty soon it feels like work.
Now think about your work: you probably have to go to a place you didn’t choose, at times which don’t suit you – you have to wear specific clothes, use certain words, wear a badge, sit in a certain spot, do things a certain way, talk to certain people, use technology you hate. You may have started out engaged - but perhaps now you just want to pick up a paycheck.
There is closely related psychological phenomenon called the ‘Overjustification Effect’. In essence researchers found that if they gave kids rewards for playing with crayons, they could turn play into work: the kids stopped playing with the crayons when the rewards stopped. The significance of the reward is that it is a form of control (and of course there are many other forms of control). You may want to play with crayons but once someone else telling you to play with crayons, it’s not so much fun.
So here’s the practical implication: organisations talk about ‘building engagement’ or ‘improving performance’ as if they were not responsible for systematically destroying it in the first place. The best way for organisations to build engagement would be to start removing some of the hundreds of things they do to depress it on a daily basis – instead of, say, doubling their efforts to communicate the company vision. How do they identify these depressors? Maybe they should start by talking to employees and finding out what is bugging them. (That’s just design thinking, after all).
Recently I’ve been talking to quite a few people about factors that affect their engagement. Curiously they don’t talk much about big things like the company vision or values. It’s all about the small things. They tend to talk about little things – like dress code. Or pizza. Or coffee. Or whether their line manager treats them like a human being on a daily basis.
Equally, the guy who is ‘helping put a man on the moon by sweeping the floor’ is a phony engagement story: what if you work for a chain of burger restaurants? For the most part people believe in what they are doing at a personal level – for example, improving the customer experience, helping people develop, helping them become better leaders, being respected for their expertise. They don’t need the organisation to give them a ‘why’ – they already have a ‘why’.
Of course I understand that when an organisation pays someone to do a job, they expect to have some say in how it is done; my point is that most employees would do a better job if the organisation were designed with usability in mind - if instead of 'here's the job and how to do it', it were more 'how can we help you do the thing you do?'
In Nietzsche’s work he contrasts Apollonian and Dionysian forces – the forces of rationality & order and instinct & experience (‘system 2’ and ‘system 1’ if you prefer). Organisations have vastly underestimated the role of Dionysian forces in shaping engagement and performance. The Apollonian ‘company vision’ has far less to do with engagement than the Dionysian ‘UX’ – how it feels to work there, everyday.
In summary, most people come to work with their own sense of purpose. They don’t need to be ‘aligned’ with a company vision to be engaged – they just need organisations to stop making their jobs difficult.
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