Back in September, a region-wide study reported that the “glamourisation of productivity” and “rise and grind” mentality had taken its toll on employees across the region. Interestingly, while Singapore employees spend less than or as much time at work as others across Southeast Asia, they reported the lowest levels of engagement and job satisfaction.
In the communications and PR sector, we’ve become so accustomed to work and play bleeding into one that punching out your timesheet at the end of each day can feel alien. Mobile phone push notifications, LinkedIn direct mails, “just one more thing” messages on WhatsApp – it doesn’t matter if you’re physically away from the laptop, you’re still actively engaged. But positive change is happening in the workplace.
Defining work-life harmony
Over the last few years, you may have heard various thought leaders debating work-life balance, then work-life integration, and now we’ve reached what’s termed work-life harmony.
This is most succinctly described as where work and life are no longer demarcated but become interdependent elements, where an employee can align their passions with their profession. This mindset shift feels much more attuned to the era of the great resignation and other trends showing employees are more conscious than ever of how, and crucially why they expend energy for the benefit of their employer.
For managers, the nature of work-life harmony throws up interesting challenges when leading high-performing teams, but in addition, it gives pause for thought in one’s own daily routine.
One of the many work productivity processes I’ve tried implementing is the Eisenhower Matrix. I’ve always admired the simplicity and perspective it gives when prioritising tasks through a clear lens – from the urgent and important to the not urgent and unimportant.
Having this perspective in your own daily work can have powerful personal effects, important stuff gets the attention it deserves within a manageable timeframe, and overall, you better manage your own expectations as well as those of your colleagues.
Also Read: How to make remote work more seamless and less distributed
With balance, a better sense of perspective and creating healthier boundaries as core tenets, what if managers were to consider a similar matrix when engaging their employees?
For example:
- Important/urgent – actually business critical, may require immediate overtime, be transparent with the team on the “why” and compensate and reward the effort required.
- Important/not urgent – nothing breaks if this can be left until the morning; consider when this task is communicated to the team, and if it’s late, schedule the request so it’s timed to hit inboxes in the morning.
- Not important/urgent – consider what can be outsourced or automated in advance, and if absolutely necessary for team input outside of office hours, communicate a strong rationale.
- Not important/not urgent – will the cost of burdening your team and affecting morale with such a task outweigh the time spent doing it yourself? If yes, take it on for the team.
A large part of the thinking here is about conserving your team’s energy levels, where each task can chip away at an invisible energy bar. Alongside that, there’s an overlapping bar for tolerance, where too many delegated tasks, delivered without a clear rationale, affect both energy levels and sap morale. When those drain to the bottom, team retention inevitably wanes and employees will leave your company.
Final thoughts
As we enter an uncertain next 12 months for the global economy, difficult periods are inevitable, and senior managers will need to get to know their team’s unique ways of working more than ever before. But crucially, this is not about surveilling or requiring more oversight on what each person is doing at any given time.
If the right boundaries are set and explicitly communicated, mutual respect and empathy are shown, and a very clear “why” is framed around a department’s mission and goals, managers can keep their valued employees energised and engaged.
Our ways of working have changed forever over the last two and a half years, and it’s important for each senior manager to define what work-life harmony means for their team, secure buy-in, and then go out of their way to ensure employees can actually achieve it.
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