Work Life Balance

A paper by Sanjiv Narang

Director: Innovation Systems Consulting

The tussle between work orientation and life

orientation has been going on for a long period of
time. My first brush with it came, when I was in
school and I came across two English lessons with
opposite learning points. The key learning point of
one was that the work of the world has to be done
and there is so little time to do it. The key learning
point of the second was that it was a great pleasure
to lie on a hill in sunshine and watch the clouds
float by.
Which one of them is the right orientation?
The key to answer lies in the term,” Balance”.
Nature is the master of balance which it creates among different and sometimes
opposite forces. Whenever the balance is disturbed, it creates chaos and suffering.
The balance among the 4 seasons is symbolic of this optimal equilibrium. What
happens if the parching heat of summer is not neutralized by the coolness of the
monsoon showers?
Crops get destroyed and the land becomes barren. If this continues, the land
becomes incapable of supporting life.

This indicates the importance and relevance of balance among life forces.
Whenever the balance is disrupted the life forces can become destructive forces.
The same thread of thought runs in so many powerful human approaches such as
the,”Middle Path” of Buddha. The foundation of the middle path philosophy is the
balance between living activities.

This thread extends to the concept of,” Balance of power”. Democracy survives
because of the balance of power among different democratic institutions such as
judiciary and parliament. If the balance of power is disrupted and excessive power
gets concentrated in one institution it leads to demagoguery and exploitation. This
thread of thought is so large that it connects even unrelated entities. In the
movie,”star wars”, the power which was optimally distributed among the senate
got concentrated in the hands of one, who inadvertently assumed the role of
emperor. Democracy was subverted.

Thus balance plays a key role in the optimal survival capability of human kind.
If this balance does not exist between work and life, it is bound to have a
downward spiraling impact on performance as well as quality of life.

Let us examine a few cases of “Work-Life imbalance” and see what we can learn
from them:

A textile co. had a 6 day week and the daily work timing was from 9.00am to 5.45
pm. One of the professed human resource objectives of the top management was
to develop the habit of late working among executives and managers. Thus, it was
common for some executives to work till 8 pm. For 6 days a week and there were
some enthusiastic souls who would come for a couple of hours on Sunday too. On
the face of it this seems to be a good state of affairs. Everybody is working so
hard to make the organization successful. Intense karm yogis are continuously at
work. However, as we dig below the surface the real state of affairs emerges. The
actual amount of work done by the organizational personnel is at-most 2-3 hrs.
The rest of the time is spent in gossiping, politicking and light banter. The
objective of al executive personnel is to reach office on time. Subsequently, the
pace is leisurely in terms of tea, some chatting and more tea.
So,if the top management perceives that they can get more work out of the
executive personnel by increasing the amount of time at the work place, they are
completely off the mark.. This, in fact breeds complacency, people become
impervious to change and small events tend to get blown out of proportions. Since
organizational personnel spend a lot of time gossiping, small events get blown out
of proportion. In case one of the female employees is spending some time with
one of the male employees, it will become the talk of the entire organization. This
is one of the consequences of the work-life imbalance forced on the employees by
their managements under the mistaken assumption that more time spent in the
office means more work and hence greater organizational efficiency.
The questions that arise are
,”What is the dynamics of the correlation between time spent in the office and
productivity?”
“Is the law of diminishing returns as applicable to the amount of time spent in
office as in economics?”
Let us draw a comparison between “work-life balance based productivity” and
work-life imbalance based productivity”
In order to facilitate comparison, we need to convert the different value adding
activities that we do in our office into units of work.
Case 1: Insy Consulting

The different value adding activities in the value chain and associated units of
work are given in the table below:

Value-adding Units of work/hr

Activities
Instruction design 5
Project proposal 3
Marketing 3
Information management 1
Team building 2
Website development 1
Blog writing 1
Intelligence gathering 1
A/cs .2
e-mail management 1

Non-Value adding Units of

Activities work/hr
Share market analysis 0
Idle gossip 0
Lunch 0
Random Internet surfing 0
Daydreaming 0

Observed Data: Workday (8hrs.)

Arun, a consultant with Insy consulting does the following activities on a regular
workday:

S.No. Time taken Activity Units of work

1 15 min. E-mail check .25
2 45 min. E-mail connected surfing 0
3 20 min. Share market analysis 0
4 2 hrs Project proposal preparation 6
5 40min. Marketing communication 1.5
6 20min. e-mail recheck 0
7 1 hr Random internet surfing 0
8 1 hr Peripheral activities 0
9 1 hr Argumentation 0
10 ½ hr Wooly thinking 0

Workday productivity =7.75

Since Arun is not able to complete his work upto his satisfaction, so he usually
puts in 1 hr. of work at his home office before sleeping. The activity done during
this time, is blog/website updation. Therefore Arun’s total productivity is
8.75.Arun undertakes this activity and continuously sacrifices his interests in book
reading, music and sports.

Arun’s total life day productivity=8.75

Arun is going through a work-life imbalance. As this is becoming a continual

process, Arun is loosing touch with his interests, studies of his children,
mother feels that he has no time for her and that she needs to write of her
child since he is married with his own family and his wife feels that he is not
giving her any attention. Arun is feeling increasingly frustrated .This is
leading to increasing conflict at home as well as in office. The increase in
conflict is increasing the incidence of wooly thinking at home as well as in
office leading to further productivity declines. Thus, Arun is in a downward
spiral of performance.

Learning Points:

On analyzing Arun’s case the following learning points come to the fore:

1. The cause of work-life imbalance in Arun’s life is not excess work. It is

faulty identification of activities to be done during a day. It is faulty
planning of work to be done. Arun is choosing to do a lot of activities
during the work day which are non-productive. Choice of activities needs
to be an inside-out competency. This faulty planning is having a work-
spillover effect. Work is getting spilled onto the rest of the day which
should be devoted to living and life activities.
2. If Arun redesigns the set of activities that he does during the work day, his
productivity can increase by 100%.The redesigned set of activities for
Arun are as follows:
S..No. Activity Time taken Units of work/hr
1 E-mail check 15 min .25
2 Proposal design 2 hrs 6
3 Marketing 2 hrs 6
4 Info. management ½ hr .5
5 Website/Blog development 1 hr 1
6 Instruction design 1 hr 5
7 Perepheral activities 1hr.& 15 0
min

Workday productivity=18.75
This level of productivity is two times the productivity that Arun is currently
achieving in spite of indulging in work-life imbalance. The redesigned set of
activities includes the work activities that Arun was doing in the evening at
his home. Thus, if Arun redesigns the set of activities at his workplace, he can
not only increase his productivity by 100%, he can also restore his work-life
balance.

3. A huge amount of time at the work place is wasted in doing peripheral

activities such as daydreaming, wooly thinking; random internet surfing,
searching for office accoutrements, talking organizational politics and
handling spiraling conflicts. Dispersed and diffused thinking tends to
gobble up productive time during the work day resulting in the pressure to
work after office hours.

4. The micro-competencies required by Arun to restore his work-life

balance and increase his productivity by 100% are as follows:
4.1 Identification of value adding activities at the work place.
4.2 Identification of the level of value added by each activity.
4.3 Formulation of a value adding activity-time plan for each work
day.
4.4. Disciplined execution of the value adding activity-time work
plan.

The value adding activities and the value added by each activity would
have a tendency to change over time as the overall yearly goal and the business
environment changes.
Therefore, the macro-competencies which subsume the micro-
competencies mentioned above are:
• Focusing
The ability to identify the year end focus.
 • Planning
The ability to map the activities to be done in order to
realize the year end focus.
• Organizing plan execution.
The ability to create a activity-person-time chart in order to
catalyze execution of plan.
• Organizing the work place.
Creating organization at the work place so that useful items
can be found and useless items do not get in the way of
productive effort.
• Concentrating on the focus.
Avoiding dispersed thinking in order to reduce wastage of
talent.

The clarity of an over-all focus serves the function of providing a direction

for day to day action and thus is the foundation for the execution of micro
competencies mentioned above.

Case 2: Bi-Tel Telecom

In Bi-Telecom, data was collected regarding the utilization of time by a

random sample of executives during a regular life day. The system of
analysis which was used was the classification of activities on the basis of
urgency and importance.
The classification is as follows:
Quadrant 1=urgent and important activities
Quadrant 2=important and not urgent activities
Quadrant 3=urgent and not important activities
Quadrant 4=not urgent and not important activities.

The average percentage of time spent by the executives during a normal

life day in each of the quadrants was:
Q1=47%
Q2=26%
Q3=12%
Q4=15%

The key learning imparted to the personnel was that they need to devote
more time to Q2 activities so that the percentage of time spent in Q1 is
reduced thereby reducing the occurrence of crises.
Though the analysis is interesting and has its value, it suffers from one
major blind spot.
The life quadrant is completely missing from the analysis.
The entire analysis is of urgent and important tasks whereas life
giving activities such as watching the sunset or reading an interesting
book or playing the violin or listening to music are not even part of
the perception.

Thus, there is bound to be work-life imbalance. The

consequence on the individual is loss of love for life and the loss of the
shine in the yes and the genuine smile on the face while the loss for the
organization is reduced productivity, low creativity and high
turnover.

Case 3: Alpha Spinning

Some traditional organizations try to develop a workaholic organization

culture. The inherent assumption is that more time spent in the office leads
to more productivity.
The top management of Alpha Spinning believed in late working and
tended to reward those who worked late and tended to come on Sundays
too. In fact, it had become a strategy with some ambitious executives to
come on Sunday and come into the eyes of the top management.
Alpha spinning had a 6 day week and working hours from 9.00 to 5.30.
Let us examine the impact of this preferred work-life imbalance. A
random survey of the different departments yielded the following
observations:

Exports department:
At 5.15 everyday the head of exports calls in his team and gives
them tasks to occupy them for the next one –two hrs. The dominant
grievance is ,”We were sitting idle for at least half the day. Why couldn’t
the tasks be given to us at that time? Why are the tasks being given to us at
5.15 when the time to go home is coming near?”
On his part the head of exports is giving them tasks at that time because he
wants the top management to believe that his team is awfully busy and
dedicated.

IT Department:
The head of IT is in office from 8.45 to 7 everyday. He spends his
time in the office .What kind of activities he is doing is not known? He is
seen chatting with materials personnel and other senior personnel daily for
at least 2 hrs.

Marketing department:
In the marketing department, the executives are observed chatting
and discussing palmistry for at least half the work day.

Training department:
The training department executives are busy during training days
but on non-training days they are observed moving from department to
department chatting and even reading fiction during office hours.

This state of affairs is prevalent in all departments .The organization on

the basis of its presumptions decided to increase the work time from 5.30
to 5.45 and there was an unwritten communication passed to all HODs
that they need to develop the habit of working late in their respective
teams.

The resultant impact of this overall state of affairs was a cascading

listlessness among a dominant section of the employees. The orientation
towards improvement and innovation was non-existent.
The personnel felt that,”Life was passing them by”

This is work life imbalance of the worst sort. Personnel are spending
more time in the office but there productivity is stagnant and even
declining. The zest for life and improvement is missing. This is what
happens when work life imbalance extends beyond a sustainable
point. People are working in name only. There is only an appearance
of work happening. Rather than tapping the talent of personnel such
a work culture kills it.

About the author:

Sanjiv Narang is Director of Innovation Systems Consulting.
He is a consultant in the areas of innovation, Organization development,
Leadership development and HR systems. His website and blog addresses
are www.innovativetraining4u.com and www.trainingpoint.blogspot.com