Work/ Life Hanging in the Balance

Sharing personal thoughts doesn’t always come naturally to me, particularly when it’s outside of those who I trust the most and is about something where I reflect on personal experience. However, the story about Anna Sebastian Perayil, who lost her life after enduring months of intense work without any consideration for her health, her wellbeing, and her personal time, really sparked something in me.

Reading her story got me thinking about how work/life balance matters, but also about how nobody seemed to notice that her workload was too much. I know that within each of us, our instinct tells us never to say anything when we have too much on our plate. We can manage, we’ll get it done, an extra hour or two here and there. Then I realised that I still do literally all of this.

While I’ve gotten better, I’ll still start work early (although I’m an early bird, so this works for me anyway), I’ll still often work past the time I’m supposed to finish, and “yes” tends to be my answer to everything!

I’ve been close to burnout on more than one occasion. I always think that my best effort isn’t quite as much as I could have given, or that I could generally (always) do better. In the past, I used to do my day at work, go home for dinner and keep working. Sometimes I even worked from bed, well into the wee hours of the morning.

Did my manager put this pressure on me? No.
Did my manager expect me to do more than I did already? No.
Did I put both of these things upon myself? Yes.

Everybody wants to succeed. We all have our aspirations and things we want to achieve in life. It’s generally been drilled into us that the harder we work, the more successful we’ll be, but when the line between our work life and personal life starts to blur, we have to ask if companies have enough in place to recognise when this is happening to someone.

A lot of companies invest money in culture, and creating a great working environment, but does that mean that a manager can recognise when someone’s bandwidth has been stretched? Or when they need some more support? Are we falling short on training to recognise these things?

Most people don’t live to work, or work to make money for other people. Of course when you’re starting out in a new career, a lot of time and effort goes into it, but it doesn’t mean that people are robots who can (and want to) work 24/7 and not have any down-time. The importance of an actual work/life balance, and being in a culture that encourages that is extraordinarily important.

Working hard to achieve your goals shouldn’t mean that you’re burning out. It shouldn’t mean that you have to sacrifice time with friends, family or time for yourself, just to complete a task that’s, in the grand scheme of things, probably not as urgent as it’s being made out to be.

I’m sure that everyone has read a story or two about people who have experienced burnout. It’s debilitating and takes months of both mental and physical recovery. No job should cause that. No job should cause your body to break down.

When I reflect on how I used to work in the past, I don’t even recognise myself. Was I running on low sleep and high caffeine? I was! Was I working early in the morning and late at night? Yep. Did I think by working more hours I’d surely do better? You bet! Was I right? Absolutely not.

So what changed, you might be wondering. Why am I writing about this?

What changed for me was a manager who recognised that something wasn’t right. That I wasn’t myself, and simply said three words; “Are you okay?”.

My answer was simple, too; “No”.

At this point everything changed. The reality was that I was on autopilot, but not actually being effective at anything both in work and outside of it. I was given the support to get back on track - all I needed to do was communicate and the help was there. Fast forward to today, where I’m Head of People Operations, and have been building out our processes, policies, company events etc. and one thing will always remain centre to my belief system; No company exists without the people in it, and a company’s best asset is its people.

Now don’t get me wrong. Companies have targets and goals too, absolutely, but it’s the people within the company who hit those targets, and I feel it’s important that companies ask themselves what they have in place to ensure that employee burnout doesn’t happen, or is at least spotted and alleviated. What’s in place to support people, or does everyone feel comfortable starting these conversations?

Companies can replace people, but families can’t.

As People Ops (Or POps, as I’m called internally!) I recognise that things take time. Change takes planning, preparation, implementation, execution, trialling and iterating until it fits your needs. Mistakes will be made, plenty of them, but it’s worth it to create an environment where people feel okay to share when they need some help.

Does that mean that I’ve taken out my wand and conjured up a magical land of perfection? No. Will I get things right the first time around? No, and probably not the second time either, but I’m doing my best and am being supported in my efforts.

What I’m incredibly aware of is that each person in a company is different. We all have our own needs, and work in different ways. One size most definitely doesn’t fit all, but it doesn’t mean that as People professionals we should implement whatever is easiest just to say we’ve done something.

Reading about Anna got me thinking about how I was fortunate to be asked how I was doing and given the support to get back on track, but I know that doesn’t happen everywhere. As POps, I’m asking myself what else can we do, or how can we create an environment where it’s okay to not be okay. Our job has so many components, from strategic planning, reviews, L&D, onboarding, events, culture etc., but at the centre of all of that is simply people.

I view this through two lenses. An employee who needed support (maybe without realising it myself), and People Ops who wants to make sure enough support is there. It’s only in recent months, maybe a year at most, that I’ve started to be strict about my own work/ life balance - old habits die hard - but I can safely say that I’m much better for it. Better personally, with my friends, family and yes, at work too. I’ve started actually taking my lunch break, most days I finish work on time, and I don’t check emails when I finish for the day. I prioritise things outside of work so that I need to leave.

There’s a long way to go, and not every company has the same budget to be able to offer different types of support, but we can all start somewhere. This isn’t an easy conversation, but it’s one that needs to happen. We’re all human at the end of the day, with our own dreams and aspirations, so I ask the questions;

What else can we do as People professionals to safeguard employees?
What have some of you been able to implement that has made a difference?
Where do we go from here to make sure if someone is struggling, something is done?

I’d like to learn from others, and share my experiences too, so let’s start a conversation.