Is
Work-Life Integration Right for You?
By Jun Salipsip
Early
in my career, there was a saying that when you leave home for work, you leave
your family problem behind. And when you
leave work for home, you leave your work problem behind. There was supposed to be a sharp division
between work and your family life. It
probably worked then because change was relatively a bit slower compared to
today and things can wait till the next morning.
But as
deregulation opened up economies and competition of all kinds intensified,
nothing could wait till the next morning because your customers need to respond
to their own customers quickly before their competition could beat them on the
draw. Technology added more impetus to
changes that is happening by improving on the efficiency and effectiveness of
everything especially communication.
With better communication, new ideas and innovation spread more quickly
thereby creating more new ideas and innovation.
Better communication also created better informed and more demanding customers
whose taste for better and new products and services became more sophisticated.
A lot
of demand is, therefore, placed on business organizations and the people
running them. Some businesses could not compete and therefore either closed
down or were bought by other more effective and efficient business
organizations. Successful companies streamlined their operations, adopted new
technologies to gain efficiencies and maintained only part of their formerly
large organization.
Just like
anyone else, I worked hard to help the company I am working for to get ahead of
competition. When there was a new
project that had to be launched, I eagerly volunteered for it, thereby adding
more tasks to my overloaded “to do list.”
Working late in the office and traveling was a regular thing. At that time, I have a young daughter in the
elementary grades. She had school events
and games to attend now and then and most of all, lots of homework to do every
day. I leaned heavily on my wife to
attend to the needs of my young daughter.
To do this, she had to quit her job without any hesitation. And when I am working late or traveling, I
called home as often as I could to talk to my wife and daughter.
As I
moved upward in the corporate ladder, I continued to work harder to keep up
with my ambitious colleagues. By this
time, my daughter was already in high school and school work and home
assignments had become more complicated.
One late night, while I was waiting for my hotel room in Singapore to be
ready for occupancy, I thought of calling home.
I was surprised that it was my daughter who answered the phone. When I asked why she was still awake very
late that night, she said that she was struggling with a particular school assignment
that had to be submitted the next day. I
asked her where her mother was and why she was not helping with her
homework. She said that her mother told
her that it was the kind of work that I could only do for her. I told her that I am sorry I was not around
to help her.
She
said, “It is alright Papa. I know you
are working and doing what you like to do.”
I was
speechless and couldn’t say anything.
Then my daughter, who was very considerate, said, “It’s late Papa. You must be tired. Goodnight.
Love you.”
After
a long pause, when she did not get any reply from me, she hanged the phone. I
must have been teary eyed because people were staring at me. It was one of those nights when sleep did not
come easy. I couldn’t wait to finish
what I was working on. I wanted to go
home and embrace my daughter to let her know she is more important to me than
my work.
From
then on, every time I had to stay late in the office or attend to a dinner
appointment, I called up my daughter to let her know I will be late and to ask
her to sleep early, and to promise her I will wake her up when I arrive so that
we can do her homework together. It was
not the best arrangement but we both tried hard to make it work.
All of
us have a life to live. But what should
we live for and how do we live that chosen kind of life?
I
think the answer to the first question on what we should live for depends on
what we value. It serves as a guide to
set our goals and the choices that we make in our life to achieve our
goals. Given a set of alternatives, our
values will help us select which ones to prioritize.
Value Clarification
This
was clearly brought home to me when I took a value clarification session with
some of my colleagues. There were almost
a hundred index cards with one value written on each one prominently posted on
the board in front of us. Since we were
not too many, each one of us could get as many as 5 values each, if we wish
to. We were given time to study all the
values posted on the board and explanations were given to all the questions
that we asked. A certain amount of token
was equally given to all of us. We were
told that each of the value will be auctioned.
When a value goes on the block, each one of us can call for our
competitive bid by naming the price we were willing to buy the value for.
As the
auction began, the auctioneer was fast and furious in her pace. She would sometimes put on the block a certain
value and urge, goad, provoke and prod the participants to call for competitive
bid and without much pause declares the winning bidder if there is a lull in
the process. At times she would put a
value on the block with an offer price that is equivalent to the total amount
of token that were individually given to us which sometimes caused failure of
the participants to enter a bid.
As the
auction continued I have been out-bided by my colleagues because I have
selected a few values for myself and allocated my tokens to each one of them in
accordance to their importance to me.
When the competitive bid went beyond the amount I have set in my mind I
hesitated to bid up because that meant I have to sacrifice the other values I
have chosen. At the end of the auction,
my tokens were intact but useless with no worthwhile values to show. I realized that I did not know which of those
values I would have given and spent all my tokens for. Her question was: “Is it the same with my life? Do I know what I would give my life for?”
The
late Steve Jobs is one of those who clearly understood the importance of
values. In his speech to a graduating class he said,
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like, ‘If you live each day
as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then,
for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked
myself, ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am
about to do today1?
That
was a powerful impression that left a lasting imprint in the mind of Steve Jobs
and guided him in his life. He knew what
he wanted in life and made sure that everything he did was in accordance or
integrated with what he valued even up to the time of his death2.
Clear Purpose in Life
The
words of Steve Jobs reminded me of the “Franklin Day Planner” created by Hyrum
W. Smith. It was also meant to be a guide
on how we should live our life. Before a
planner was handed out to anyone, there was workshop that everyone was required
to take. The workshop was about writing
down what each one of us value or what is important to each one of us. We were also asked to write down the
long-term goals associated with what we valued.
The rationale given to us that we all agreed to was the following facts:
most day planners given every new year as a gift are enthusiastically filled up
in the month of January, less enthusiastically filled up in February, and
forgotten by March because there was no compelling reason to write down and
perform activities that are not supported by a clear purpose.
The
“Franklin Day Planner”, without me realizing it at that time, was a system that
would help the user to integrate what he or she values with his goals and his
life’s activities. It even has a ranking
system of each activity: A – extremely
important (because it is related to what you value), B – moderately important,
C – relatively unimportant. This is
quite close to Stephen Covey’s idea of prioritization.
Stephen
Covey wrote a book entitled “First Things First” where he described a “framework
for prioritizing work that is aimed at long-term goals, at the expense of tasks
that appear to be urgent, but are in fact less important.” He used two
dimensions of work by categorizing tasks into whether they are urgent and
whether they are important.
Below
is the Time Management Matrix by Stephen Covey classifying task as urgent and
non-urgent on one axis, and important or non-important on the other axis. According to Stephen, the list on Quadrant 2
should reflect what is really important to us and where he believes we should
focus on to achieve our goals3.
This time management formula is attributed to former US President Eisenhower. It recognizes that “important tasks may not be urgent, and urgent tasks are not necessarily important.”
Work-Life Integration
Another
program I know that emphasized values was “Managing Personal Growth” (MPG) by
Blessing/White, Inc. The Participant Guide
given to us in the workshop explained that without firm values, we not only
lose confidence in our decisions but we also tend to be apathetic, indecisive,
and inconsistent. However, it recognized
the problem that identifying our most important value is not easy because of
“cultural and organizational pressures to accept certain values as our own.” And if an individual does not know what he
wants out of life and is not clear about what he values he can be pressured to
accept the values of the organization he works for resulting into a feeling of
being exploited by the company that may lead to a lot of misunderstanding.
The MPG
program went on to say that people who have jobs they really like tend to
perform better than those who dislike their jobs. And since organization seeks maximum
contribution from its employees, each employee must seek maximum satisfaction
from their jobs. According to the program,
each job has its own unique characteristics and it is the fit between the job
characteristics and one’s own personal value that determines how satisfying a
job is to an individual.
Below
is an image of the “Blessing/White, Inc. - Managing Personal Growth (MPG) Model
- Napkin Drawing.” There are two paths
that cross each other” the organization’s path towards achieving its goals and
an individual’s path towards achieving his or her goals. Where the two paths meet is our work.
In the
workshop, we were asked to map out where we were inside the box, indicating our
current level of satisfaction and contribution.
As the illustration below shows, there are three likely places you could
find yourself in the resulting diamond-shaped box: first, on the left hand side
where an employee is very satisfied with his or her work but where his or her
contribution is at the lowest; second, on the right hand side where an employee
is a high contributor but is not satisfied with his or her job; and third, on
top, where an employee is very satisfied with his or her job and is also a high
contributor to the achievement of the goals of the organization. On the first
one, the employee is likely to get fired, on the second one, the employee is
likely to quit, and on the third one, both the employee and the organization is
achieving their goals – it’s the ideal place to operate.
It was
so far the best illustration of work-life integration that I know of.
There
was also a quote in the MPG program from Peter Senge which somehow expressed
work-life integration: “To seek personal
fulfillment only outside of work and to ignore the significant portion of our
lives we spend working would be to limit our opportunities to be happy and
complete human being.”
And if
I may add another quote from Steve Jobs in his speech before the graduating
class of Stanford, he said, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your
life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great
work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
The
work I had gave me a sense of accomplishment every time I overcome the many
challenges of being given new and higher responsibilities. The changes in my work also provided me with
new experiences and a sense of self-improvement whenever we adapt to new
conditions in the market. And last but
not the least, it provided my family a comfortable life.
But
the work I had demanded understanding of the key factors that determine the
value of my contribution to achieving the goals of the organization and required
developing new competencies and skills to remain competitive. My boss had always been supportive in
providing insights and in giving me the training that I needed to succeed. But
the continuous learning and development always took time.
Vilfredo Pareto Principle and Malcom
Gladwell’s 10,000 Hours Theory
As we
all know time is a very limited commodity.
As I performed my daily tasks, the 80/20 Pareto Principle kicked in. In a competitive world, one must excel in
whatever one does. To excel I learned
that one would need to work much, much harder.
I think this is related to the 10,000 hours theory written by Malcom
Gladwell in the book, “The Outlier.” In
his book, Malcom Gladwell said that “researchers have settled on what they
believe is the magic number for true expertise:
10,000 hours of practice to achieve the level of mastery associated with
being a world class expert – in anything.”
Since
change kept happening there were always new tasks to learn and it kept me glued
to the same routine on spending more time at work. Lately, I read Thomas Friedman who wrote in
the New York Times an article titled “Owning Your Own Future” and reprinted in Philippine
Star in May 11, 2017. He wrote, “I believe the acceleration set loose by
Silicon Valley in technology and digital globalization have created a world
where every decent job demands more skill and now, lifelong learning.”
We all have only 24 hours a day and in those 24
hours you have to fit in the following: a time to learn new and more skills to
a level where you become an expert in all of them; a time to be a better family
man; a time for sports and exercise to maintain good health; and a time for
some socio-civic activities. How will I
ever find the 10,000 hours I would need to excel in all of them?
Is Work-Life Integration Right For Me?
Later,
in another occasion, I was made to choose between work and family. I was then traveling with my boss to Thailand
when I received a message from my secretary.
The message said that my elderly aunt was in bad condition and was rushed
to the hospital. According to the
message my secretary was told by my wife that my aunt was asking for me. I grew up with my aunt but did not have much
time for her when I started working. It
was she who took care of me when I was a child because my mother was sickly.
With
some hesitation, I told my boss that I have to head back home right away because
my aunt was hospitalized. I literally dumped
all the paper work and presentation materials on my boss and headed straight to
the airport to fly back home to take care of the woman who brought me up as a
child. When I saw her in the intensive
care unit, there were all sorts of tubes connected to her. When she saw me she
cried. She held my hand tightly without
words. I stroked her hair and gave her
reassuring words. I think that meant a
lot to her.
Later,
when she died I missed her a lot and wished I could have spent more time with
her. But she was gone and I could no longer retrieve the lost opportunity to be
with her and whatever I did with that time that I could have spent with her
could not be changed.
I
think it is not a question of whether work-life integration is right or wrong
for anyone. I think, difficult as it may
be, we need to keep trying in integrating our work with life.
###
1 (http://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/)
2 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/with-time-running-short-steve-jobs-managed-his-farewells.html)
3 (Time
Management Matrix by Stephen Covey,
https://sidsavara.com/coveys-time-management-matrix-illustrated/)
