I listened to the radio on my way to a meeting this morning
and heard Karen
Blackett, CEO of Mediacom, talking about part time working. The one thing
she said which really struck a chord with me involved changing one
word. Let’s go back a step first though (a big step to start):
 |
| Anubis weighing a heart. |
As long ago as 3000 years
BC, sophisticated weights and measures were standardised. Amongst the intriguing early
equipment excavated from ancient sites there are many sets of scales and weights. The
ancient Egyptians believed that Anubis measured your heart against a feather in
the afterlife, to see if you were worthy of entry into heaven.
Scales work by achieving
balance; things are measured against each other and an even weight for
each achieved through adjustment. Balance, visually and by implication,
suggests (to me) exclusivity. If you have a pound of gold on one side, and a
pound of steel on the other, though they weigh the same, they are different.
You would not balance the scale by putting some gold on with the steel, or vice versa.
But back to Karen and her talk about the workplace. The current
popular phrase for how people cope with their work and home life is ‘work life balance’.
This implies that you cannot combine the two – that you have work, or you have
home, and never the twain shall meet.
That may have been true in past times, in an industrialised era when the
knocker-upper woke you for your shift at the factory, and the whistle blew for
knocking off time. A period of ‘hard knocks’, to say the least. But is it true
now?
 |
| A knocker upper |
Today we still have industrialised occupations, but we also
have a much wider world of work which includes remote working, home working, even
virtual working. We can attend conferences without leaving our desk, or even
without leaving our homes. As we become more digitised, as communications have
rushed us into the 21st century
(not exactly kicking and screaming but more tweeting and streaming), so our
working lives have also changed.
Karen used the term ‘work life blend’ – and the substitution
of that one word (balance for blend) makes a world of difference. Home life and
work life are a combination – and frequently flow into each other instead of
being mutually exclusive. Work doesn’t
just begin when you get to the office; individuals are ‘clocking on’ before
they even leave home (Mozy, 2012).
Though this one word may seem quite a simple change, it has
an impact on perception. Conflicting demands of work and home can cause
excessive stress (Health & Safety Executive, 2014). And research
suggests further stress - ‘a conflict between high-performance practices and work-life balance
policies’ (White, 2003). It is understandable, therefore, that many
individuals seek to reduce the stress that an ever-demanding working life puts
on them.
If you change the word ‘balance’, which implies juggling,
struggling, with ‘blend’, which implies combination and mutuality, you are
instantly addressing the challenge with a positive starting attitude. Sometimes
the change can be small – just one word – but the difference it could make may
be huge.
References
Health &
Safety Executive. (2014). What about stress at home? Retrieved from
Health & Safety Exeuctive: http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/furtheradvice/stressathome.htm
Mozy. (2012). The
New 9 to 5. Retrieved November 2014, from
http://mozy.co.uk/about/news/reports/9-5
White, M. H.
(2003). High-performance’ Management Practices, Working Hours and Work–Life
Balance'. British Journal of Industrial Relations.
Further reading
Knocker upper photo courtesy of http://www.laboiteverte.fr/photos-mysteres-n74/
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