Virtual Technical Services by Mary Beth Weber & Melissa De Fino

Author:Mary Beth Weber & Melissa De Fino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

Work/Life Balance

While studies have shown that exercise helps minimize the effects of burn-out, some have also revealed that employees who exhibit the highest levels of exhaustion have the greatest difficulty and least motivation to begin and continue exercise.29 This shows that physical activity alone cannot be a magic bullet to control burnout. As an occupational syndrome, physical activity and other self-care and wellness methods must go together with changes to the work environment. Restructuring our workday and altering our expectations about work can help combat burnout.30

The eight-hour day and forty-hour week were invented over one hundred years ago to achieve work/life balance. First introduced in factories, advocated by labor unions, and ultimately codified by the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the idea was that employees would spend eight hours at work, eight hours asleep, and eight hours at leisure.31 This was a progressive idea for the time, and it made sense when most employees lived close to their workplaces; had a partner at home who was responsible for domestic labor such as childcare, cooking, and cleaning; and when work was done in a factory setting. The landscape now is much different. Commutes are much longer.32 Transportation is the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions.33 Fewer adults are married,34 and more women are in the workforce. While more mothers are working now than ever before, a larger share of domestic labor still falls to them.35 Productivity looks different in an academic or professional setting than it does in a factory, where the eight-hour workday was first developed. Some projects may require fewer than eight hours a day, while others may require more.

Although Americans are working longer hours than ever before,36 research shows that experts across all fields are only capable of being at their most productive for four to five hours a day. This is true whether their labor is professional, creative, or even athletic. In the business world, executives and managers spend most of their time on meetings and trivial concerns of the office, leaving even fewer than four to five hours spent being deliberately productive.37

With all this in mind, some corporations are now experimenting with flexible schedules to maximize productivity, employee engagement, and work/ life balance as a means of minimizing burnout. In 2019, Amazon trialed a flexible thirty-hour workweek. Employees in the trial were all expected to work between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. four days a week, and then logged the remaining fourteen hours at times of their choosing the rest of the week.38 The idea behind a condensed workday is that the hours spent at work are spent deliberately focused on work, and not distracted by non-work-related matters. By mindfully focusing on work while at work, and then taking time outside of work to focus on themselves and their families, employees are both more productive and less susceptible to burnout.

Work/life balance will not look the same for everyone, which is why flexibility and differentiation in work schedules is important. For managers, this means looking not at how many

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