Emperor’s Work-life Balance – From Henry Ford to Windows O/S

Work-life balance has been an evergreen topic of discussion for employees, management and HR alike that has only shifted venue from canteen and meeting rooms to WhatsApp. The enormous time spent debating “Work-life Balance” is to be considered as time spent on “Official” or “Personal” activity? 

The phrase "Emperor's Work-life Balance" can be understood in two ways. One, there’s nothing called Work-life balance and it’s a myth. Two, as you take higher responsibilities in career and get closer to the King (read CXOs), work-life balance also has to change accordingly. Didn’t “Eureka” happen only during personal hours of Archimedes who had to respond to the King?

·        Can a soldier guarding the country’s border or a policeman guarding the society switch-away from the role at 5pm every day?

·        Does an aspiring student preparing for his dream exam stop studying at 5pm?

“Hardwork” is sometimes just a 3^rd party’s melancholic description of someone's passion at work. During my stint in IT spanning multiple decades now, the questions I have had for myself:

1.     Don’t I make or receive important personal calls during 9am to 5pm?

2.     9am to 5pm of whom? Of myself or my colleague at the other side of planet?

3.     What happens when I’m travelling at work and at 5pm I’m in an airport or flight and not back at home with the family?

4.     A Team lunch or Lunch with a client, is personal or official?

In fact, many of the brilliant ideas for work (including the one for this write-up) happen on weekends, when the mind has the time and space.

The central idea of Work-life balance is eight hour workday or 9-to-5, which traces back to American labor unions in the era of Henry Ford in early 1900s. The average work-day is roughly modelled as in figure below.

Does our life work like this? Thankfully, not. We are all the roles that we play, all the time. We’re always a son/ daughter/ father/ citizen/ employee etc. and execute the tasks of a certain role at a given point in time as per a schedule and priority.

This idea is already well-understood and implemented in the contemporary Operating Systems like Windows O/S through multi-programming/ multiprocessing, an evolution from uniprogramming ones like MS-DOS. The work-life graph of a multi-tasking employee may look something like below. Colorful and interesting, isn’t it?

 

To add to the challenges faced by “9-to-5” is the criticism faced but used frequently only as an excuse for not working enough in a day. For example,

1.     Hard-work Vs. Smart-work: Is it the right task being done during the 8hours i.e. the smartness of the strategy that the employee is executing

2.     Is the efficiency/ Quality of work being done during the 8hrs good enough? What if it can be done in shorter time?

But one needs to remember that one’s compensation is based on an assumption that a specified amount of ‘Quality time’ to be spent by the employee for the organization. Even for the smart and efficient ones, doing more work to meet the ‘working hours’ will lead to more learning and throughput. More importantly, some labor-laws are needed to protect the interest of workforce with limited liability/ responsibility.

For those working with higher responsibilities (closer to the King), these policies are still applicable and relevant but needs to be understood better. For example, a holiday may have to mean "Low Availability" instead of "No Availability". Interpreting it based on a contemporary multi-processing model of Windows than Henry Ford's 9-5 may lead to more productive debates and meaningful outcomes.