PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Have a tough, globalized economy, ever-expanding job demands and widespread use of social media so blurred the line between work and personal life that it’s time to erase traditional notions of “work/life balance?” A recent Forrester Research report argues so, and suggests three key technologies for navigating today’s always-on environment. IT leaders, heads up.
The headline of the $749 report, “Embracing Chaos Is Smarter than Seeking an Elusive Work/Life Balance,” pretty much says it all. Perhaps your initial reaction is similar to mine: “Are they high? Give up trying to have a life?” I work as hard and long as anyone I know, more than most. I accept a longer work week, more duties and occasional really long weeks simply as the way things are today. Fortunately, I love my job, and you do what you gotta do. But to throw in the towel at least trying for balance? Sounds nuts, and more darkly, like crossing a dangerous line and acknowledging that yes, work will ultimately suck up every second of the day (and, perhaps, night). A clear lose/lose for both work and personal life.
After I calmed down, I actually read the eight-page report. The gist is this:
Don’t fight the inevitable creep of work into personal life (and vice versa). Give in.
Get comfortable with short-term sacrifices and compromises.
Instead of worrying about the hours spent at work or home, worry about the energy you’re devoting to each.
Learn to switch gears quickly between work and personal tasks, day or night, seven days a week.
Don’t ask “Am I balanced” but “Am I balanced for me?”
Focus on long-term balance.
Interesting. A nice little wavy line chart illustrates the main point: “Focus-switching allows workers to blend their work and life without short-changing either.” Your attention ping-pongs back and forth, seven days a week. Work. Life. Work. Life.
You might personally agree or disagree with this prescription. Sounds like reality, so it’s worth thinking about. Either way, no denying this genie is out of the bottle. And that, Forrester says, means smarter and wider deployment of three key technologies.
1. Robust global collaboration tools. If you’re going to ask employees to sacrifice precious personal time, companies need to do everything reasonable to maximize meeting time. Simple phone conferencing won’t cut it for global, complex collaboration. Forrester suggests Web conferencing, high-resolution video conferencing (pricey at $300,000 average), virtual world technology and instant messaging. I’d add that wikis and other simple collaboration software would be big advances in lots of organizations.
“Technology populism ( in which workers
self-provision) is a wake-up call that forces information and knowledge
management professionals to rethink how they currently evaluate, provision and
support collaborative software and services.”
2. Remote information access. Current demand for anytime/anywhere access to key corporate information – from cars, airports, home offices, mobile devices – will only grow. e-mail, while a start, is only that. Focus-shifting workers need 24 /7 access to enterprise information away from their desks. To cope with the growing legion of laptops and other mobile devices, Forrester suggests creating an ombudsman in IT operations to drive corporate strategy around usages, devices, mobile network security and data management.
3. Faster information retrieval. Corporate portal, enterprise search and other technologies that help distributed workers quickly locate and leverage vital information will become more crucial for maximizing the productivity of time-stressed knowledge workers.
The good news, Forrester says: Many Millennials lack the workaholic ways of their parents. Bad news: They expect continuous access to a wide variety of simultaneously used Web and mobile applications. That means new privacy and policy challenges for IT, and inevitable challenges to traditional prohibitions against non-standard applications and sites (Google Talk, iTunes, AOL IM, Facebook, etc.).
I hope the Forrester analysts are wrong, even if lots of their scenarios sounds all too familiar. Still, you don’t need to buy the whole premise to thinking about which parts make sense for you and your organization to kick around and adopt. The blurring of work and life requires sharper thinking than ever.
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