Most people who have worked in corporate America are probably very familiar with the term work-life balance. Probably only a fraction of those people have actually experienced it. The Wall Street Journal today reports that former General Electric CEO, and all-around business guru, Jack Welch thinks work-life balance is a fiction -- if you want to be at the top of your game. I think Welch is right for his generation, but as technology continues to advance, so should work-life balance.
Welch's comments seem to be mostly directed at women who might attempt to balance high-powered careers with the motherly duties of raising a family. Welch essentially says you can't do both:
"There's no such thing as work-life balance," Mr. Welch told the Society for Human Resource Management's annual conference in New Orleans on June 28. "There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."
Mr. Welch said those who take time off for family could be passed over for promotions if "you're not there in the clutch."
First, let's not be too hard on Welch for singling out women, because I doubt he means to. He was just speaking in context where he was asked about women. I'm sure Welch would agree that a married mother's husband could take on the majority of parenting duties if she chooses to put her career first. That's not his point.
Welch's logic actually couldn't be more obvious: if you have to spend more time in the office cultivating a career, then you will have less time to spend at home, cultivating a family. Time is a scarce resource. Thus, opportunity costs are involved.
Yet, I think technology has something to say about that. With each day that passes, the necessity of actually being in an office diminishes. Unless you work in a factory or some other labor-intensive job, where you do your work doesn't really matter. This is especially relevant to executives who spend their lives in meetings, writing memos or planning corporate strategy.
Any job that can allow employees to work from home will increasingly do so in the years to come. Why? Because it saves money. You can eliminate a great deal of overhead cost by allowing employees to "hotel" offices or cubicles on the rare occasions that they must be present. Sure, there's some technology cost involved with virtual meetings and conference calls. But as technology gets better, that will get cheaper. Of course, there are also intangible benefits to employee morale by letting people spend more time at home and less in the office.
I see rise of working from home leading to a healthier work-life balance for those who do so. You save commuting time, can more effectively utilize downtime to take care of personal issues or errands, and have more flexibility over your schedule. Obviously, people need to actually be productive when working from home. But the benefits derived by working from home should easily conjure up the necessary motivation to actually work.
Technology has also made us more effective workers. For example, before the personal computer, there's little doubt that typing up and distributing memos was a much more arduous process than editing a document in Word, spell checking it and e-mailing it off. That time savings provides effective workers with more time to be spent with family.
Right now, this probably doesn't amount to much more leisure time, because a minimum of 40-hour weeks are generally expected. So when most employees finish their work with time to spare these days, they probably spend countless hours on the internet, perhaps reading articles and blog posts at TheAtlantic.com. But if you combine greater productivity enabled by technology and more widespread working from home, you achieve an even better work-life balance. Sadly, that probably means less internet traffic during business hours.
So I don't think Welch was wrong about work-life balance during his time running GE or even right now. But I think if asked the same question in 20 years, he might have a different response.
One countervailing point, drawn from the no-doubt atypical world of large law firms, is that the same technology you're describing also means employees don't ever have to be "off-the-clock."
It's true that once you can work at home you can spend your downtime doing more "life" activities. But you can also be expected to work at any time when works needs to be done - nights, weekends, etc. - in a way you couldn't when being in the office was necessary and no one was immediately reachable by email, text message, or cell phone no matter where they were. Both my personal experience and, I believe, the general consensus are that technology has had a negative effect on work-life balance among both partners and associates at large law firms.
The breakdown here may be that jobs with relatively set or limited amounts of work to be done per day will see improved work-life balance from remote-work technology, while high intensity, unlimited work jobs (like those at large law firms, and probably the exec jobs Welch is thinking of) will see decreased work-life balance. But maybe it all comes down to firm or industry-wide norms about acceptable workloads - as I said, law firms are very atypical in many respects.
Thanks for the counterpoint. I get where you're coming from. For jobs where the work is seemingly unlimited, working from home could be a negative. Still, in my experience, even with demanding jobs in investment banking and consulting, I felt a certain freedom and serenity when working from home from time to time -- even if that meant there was an expectation that I answer always-too-frequent after hours e-mails. I found that when additional flexibility is left to an individual, s/he can often be more efficient and effective in getting any workload done, even if seemingly unlimited. Working from home seems to allow that, despite the drawbacks you speak of. It might also be about personal style, as there are those who strongly prefer to leave work at work, a sentiment I never really related to. I'd much rather leave the office with any overflow in hand, have dinner with the family, then knock it out that night in the comfort of my home.
I've found that "leaving work at work" is vital when overflow is a constant presence, and the only way to escape it is to enforce strict limits on the context of work in order to limit the constant sense of ominous doom that otherwise results. Hopefully you've never had to deal with this, but I assure you, leaving work at work is often vital to my mental health.
It has always been true that to rise to the top of your chosen career path you have to be willing to make sacrifices. There have always been people who were willing to do so and other people who made a conscious decision to trade professional success for greater personal freedom.
The problem with today's corporate environment is that many people aren't choosing one alternative over another; they're just trying to keep their jobs. For millions of "exempt" employees, working insane hours and dealing with stress aren't the way to the top -- they're a minimum requirement of continued employment.
Another counterpoint - Government Regulation. Although still relatively small in the larger context, government contractors are growing in size and scope of work in our economy. There are significant barriers to flextime/work-from-home policies when doing any sort of business with the government, particularly in a cost-plus contracting environment. Fundamentally, employees are barred by DCAA/DCMA regulations from working from home because of accountability reasons. This is very frustrating to those wishing to be flexible in their environment.
With all the stimulus money sloshing around it will be interesting to see how companies who have never worked with the USG before will react to the FAR...
Alex,
That's certainly true, but I think that's more typically an issue for the Defense / National Security side of the federal market. I've worked on mostly fixed price / T&M contracts on the consulting and IT side of the civilian market, and we'd be dead in the water if we didn't allow for working from home. There are occasionally clients who refuse to put up with employees routinely working from home but that tends to be a personal control issue rather than a FAR issue; it's just a question of whether they write it into requirements.
As for companies who have never worked with the government before, they're going to go completely mental. Never mind the paperwork associated with FAR procurements, the accounting... oh lord the accounting. But that's well off topic.
I find Welch's comments disgusting, and I do not see why the world should be organized around the bottomless needs and demands of brutish CEOs. The point should be to reduce work, which capitalism is structurally arranged to increase no matter what the cost. By way of example, I would like to know what evidence you have that the change from typewriters to computers actually reduced working time. As John Stuart Mill pointed out, no machine or technology has ever reduced the quantity of labor, it only displaced it. We know that computers did advance "productivity" (read bank earnings) over the last 20 years. The data also show over the same period no increase in actual earnings for the average worker and some lengthening of average working time, not to mention an enormous overproduction of debt, carbons, and useless junk. The Cult of Effort spread by market brutalists like Welch should be regarded as their own personal, clinical problem, not the definition of virtue or wisdom. Why can't sweaty guys like him just take their millions, retire, and get off the airwaves?
Most people can fairly breeze through their workday, and some can even work from home. In contrast, Jack Welch and the other high level executives he discussed are focused single-mindedly on their work. To them, a day off means they are working part-time. Anyone working less than full-bore is viewed as lacking commitment and unworthy of top positions. Any man or woman executive in top positions needs a wife or someone designated to take care of everything at home. No one has time to do both. If you think you can do both, you don't understand what-all is involved in those demanding jobs.
We can watch NASCAR and think "I could do that," but Jack Welch is here to tell us we just can't.
I've stopped trying to create a work-life balance. I've been making work part of my life all together to solve that problem.
The real question here is not whether we can work from home, or use technology for flexibility. The question Mr. Welch addresses is about what kind of commitment it takes to reach the top spots in a corporation. We only have so much time in a day. For more on my thoughts....
http://whenfridayswerefridays.blogspot.com/2009/07/can-you-really-have-it-all.html