Given that work + life fit is unique for each individual, there are four key ideas that employees and employers should keep in mind to make things work:ġ. Their emergence and ultimate dominance of the workplace coincides with a different approach to work/life balance, complete with nondedicated workspaces, teleconferencing, paid gym memberships, and work-team social events. WFH is a natural phenomenon to these digital natives, particularly the younger workers. They’re more open to switching jobs as well as to finding roles that will provide both a stable income and the freedom to deviate from the nine-to-five (or eight-to-eight) workday. Rook argues that the predisposition of this cohort-inherited from their Great Depression-era parents-is to be competitive, loyal to employers, and prone to prioritize their jobs over all else.īoomers’ progeny-Generation X, millennials, and Gen Z-look at things differently. So says David Rook, a marketing and digital platforms expert who studies the intersection of behavioral economics and social sciences with the creative arts. Boomers are transitioning out of their working careers, sunsetting a time of different expectations. In other words, no two people and no two employment situations are alike.Īnd, just to complicate things further, no two generations are alike. “It’s how you fit work and life together in a way that works for you and your job, day-to-day and at moments of transition,” she explains.Īccording to Yost, creating successful work + life policies depends on the nature of the business, the types of jobs and skills that make the business run, and how much flexibility those jobs allow for when, where, and how they can be done. Yost instead advocates for something she calls work + life fit. This is why you hear the common lament, ‘I don’t have balance.’” Generational Perspectives on Work/Life Balance “To infer the goal is a one-size-fits-all ‘balance,’ a fifty-fifty split between work and life, doesn’t reflect reality. “It misses the mark because everyone’s work and personal realities are completely different at any given time,” says Cali Williams Yost, a workplace futurist and leading authority on high-performance work flexibility. But it also promises something far more complex than what a simple set of workplace policies can accomplish. This might be attributed, in part, to the simple fact that the phrase “work/life balance” is overused. Unfortunately, fulfillment of that promise very often just isn’t there. In theory, it should all add up to effective stress management and optimal productivity. It should mean that people can have careers and families, that they can attend their children’s soccer games or elderly parents’ medical appointments, that they’ll have time for exercise, and that all employees can expect a healthy lifestyle filled with proper amounts of sleep as well as that all-important leisure time. Work/life balance is usually a vague promise to prospective employees that they can have a life outside of work-and that their work won’t get in the way of that life. The subject of postpandemic employment is associated with several catchphrases: “quiet quitting,” the “Great Resignation,” “WFH (work from home),” and even the dreaded “virtual happy hour.” But scan the various job boards and a long-familiar phrase gets perhaps the heaviest promotion.
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