Vacationing with a five year old is filled with constant motion, add onto this my constant need for action (cross country skiing a as much as possible each day), one finds it difficult to imagine how work or social media could enter into the picture at all.
Ten or fifteen years ago, one would wait until returning from vacation to share stories and pictures with friends and family. On this vacation we spent each evening reviewing our pictures on our laptop, posting some to Fickr for sharing with a close circle of family and on our respective Facebook pages for our wider circle of 'friends'. Our friends and family were able to keep track of our activities and comment on what they saw in real time. Some may argue what is the purpose, however we find this necessary given the speed that our world moves now, next week everybody will have moved on to something else, too busy to share on last weeks triumphs.
While this seems, and likely is, a frivolous use of a communication tool, we had an incident that occurred
proving Facebook to be an invaluable communication tool. While we were away a friend of our son's was airlifted from one hospital to another with a serious condition. A few years ago we would not have heard about this until we returned home, during this vacation we were able to keep in touch and exchange well wishes several times per day.
This was the most dramatic usage of social media and communication tools on my vacation, however there were several others. I was able to maintain my business network through the use of LinkedIn and Twitter. I even made a connection for two of my contacts for a job through Linkedin while we were away. I was able to keep up with the news through the electronic delivery of my newspapers, as well as the Twitter links and blogs I follow (through a great iPad app called Flipboard)
While I did keep up on e-mail, this was out of a need to maintain balance. This may seem counter-intuitive to work while on holidays to maintain balance, however I feel we need to change the definition of balance. Noted human resource consultant and Globe and Mail author Barbara Moses expresses concerns about these types of behaviour in her article on Work / Life Balance. Dr. Moses states that many of us find reasons to be busy and find reasons to remain in constant contact such as:
Fear of Disapproval
Guilty Conscience
Creating Busyness
Not knowing priorities
Lying about motivation
Dr. Moses has a well researched and important point, however this measures balance in the framework of the workforce in the 80's and early 90's when a pager was a luxury item. I feel that we need to define balance depending on each individual. Many of us have jobs that allow us to shift the time we actually work. While the work week might be slightly longer than it was a decade ago, flexibility allows us to work differently.
This prompts the topic, what is work/life balance? Has social media and electronic communication enhanced our ability to balance our work and family life or made it more difficult to attain balance. I truly believe that the ability to remain connected actually enhances ones ability to achieve balance in one's life. Information moves quickly in the world of Twitter and Facebook and these mediums can be used to enhance our sense of balance rather than erode a delicate sense of work/family optimization. The proliferation of mobile communication and social media allows one to define work boundaries for oneself rather than the traditional definition provided by the 3-1/2 walls of your cubicle. Examples such as Hotelling in the workplace and time shifting for personal entertainment allow individuals to change their personal habits to match their chosen lifestyle.
In the end it is more important how you feel about your balance rather than how others perceive your lifestyle. The big struggle is how do we get corporations in more mature industries to understand and equip their employees with the right tools to work inside of this new era of hyper connectivity.
So Friend me on Facebook, add me as a contact on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter or use old fashioned e-mail you never know when I might be on vacation or working --- or will there be a defined difference in the near future?
Hmmm...
ReplyDeleteI am in general agreement with your remarks about mobile devices and the continuum of social networking tools altering our perception of work/life balance. I'm not as optimistic, however, that it will generally lead to better balance or greater productivity.
I think generally when you are a 'knowledge worker' the ebb and flow of work doesn't necessarily line up with the traditional work day, creating 'white spots' within the workday, even if they are only a few minutes long. These could occur waiting for an elevator or when a conference call gets cancelled. Similarly, for many knowledge workers, work continues on in personal time because we are constantly thinking, and because the operations of the enterprise simply go on around the clock. I think the challenge for maintaining, or improving work life balance will not be coercing workers to respond to email in personal time, but to achieve a balanced and equitable 'exchange' of those whitespaces. The question will be, if workers are willing to allow work to interweave itself into personal time, will work do the same for personal pursuits at work?
There are some challenges to doing this. We often speak of the "consumerization" of IT in which employees want to use the same mobile device for both work and personal purposes. This can represent a challenge in organizations that are concerned about protection of privacy, protection of IP or just good old fashioned efficiency. The set of behaviours driving consumer choices are simply not the same behaviours that are required of individuals when they take off the 'consumer' hat and are expected to play the role of 'producer' in a team context. Processes, norms, and standards become important - we cannot simply behave as autonomous individuals without consideration for the larger organism and expect that we will collectively achieve the same level of performance.
When it comes to things like hours of work, setting expectations is an important exercise because we exist in 'team' oriented environments. In the same way that trapeze artists rely on the 'catcher' to be in a certain time and location, so too do people in businesses rely on their colleagues to behave predictably in order to deliver a service level.
So far, the way we have done that is to more or less agree to show up for work at the same time. As an employee, I already supplement my work hours with a healthy dose of after hours work on mobile devices but I would argue that it is not really an expectation. The question is, with the proliferation of mobile devices, will people like me inadvertently set that de facto expectation? This is, in my view, not really representative of a better, more flexible exchange between the employer and employee, but old school brute force method of productivity improvement: more hours for more output.
If this new approach is to be institutionalized, and if employees are going to get something back in return (other than a snazzy mobile device) then how can employers become more flexible without breaking the norms and processes that are necessary for the smooth operation of a team, or worse, of introducing a new layer of management overhead required to compensate for the problem of having everyone available when they feel like it?
I think everyone - employer and employee - need to be thoughtful going forward and ensure that the era of consumerization brings with it not only a new era, but a reasonable change to the employer-employee contract.
With respect to the consumerism of IT products, this is becoming more prevalent, largely as a result of the proliferation of tablets. Many corporate workers, such as myself, now carry a work phone, largely Blackberry and a personal phone, in my case iPhone. We have larger expectations of our company's ability to provide current IT hardware and software that are mostly out of the reach of corporate security and capital budgets. I respectfully disagree with your comments on the need for employees to more or less show up for work at the same time. Collaborative tools are available that allow for work to be done in an environment where various teammates can contribute at times that are convenient to them. Where the shift is required is for corporate cultures to adapt to this way of getting work done. There must be a shift from measuring status based on who leaves work the earliest or stays the latest to one of who gets the job done the most efficiently. The latest IT hardware does not accomplish this as technology is an enabler rather than a definer of corporate culture.
DeleteInteresting blog, Michael. I am curious to see how this new reality of always being linked in will affect us in the next 10-20 years. As we have seen with the mobile banking team, we can add so much value to our client relationships by being available when they are, without it having to be in a traditional work space. I suppose the biggest fear is not having the ability to 'shut it down' during personal time in order to achieve that balance, but then again how many people actually stop thinking about work when they are not at work???
ReplyDeleteI agree that it will be exciting to see the changes that always being online bring. Except I think we should be looking forward 2-3 years rather than 20. Change happens much more quickly in the information revolution as compared to the industrial revolution. In North American culture there are two strong status symbols, the first is often the type of vehicle one drives and the other is one's office. We need to impact corporate culture to make changes, we are not there yet as mobility tends to expand the work week rather than allowing you to work when and where you want - and when our clients want.
DeleteWhen considering the impact of workplace flexibility, one can't overlook the fact that in this industry we are essentially in the retail business and the need for on-demand personal contact, as well as the need for alternate channels of communication and access, is at the end of the day a choice which the consumer makes. We must be careful to ensure that our choice for flexibility does not move at a pace beyond the choice made by the consumer. To some degree we are seeing the reduced availability of expertise which otherwise would have been available within our walls a short while ago, due to increased flexibility within the work day available to some roles. Face to face interaction is not yet a thing of the past, and without it we lose the ability to appreciate and foster the important bonds and threads we form as human beings, which serve to differentiate us from our virtual bank competition. I'm all for automation, electronic communication and flexibility, but still believe that my business will do better if I can encourage fewer e-mails and more handshakes. While an e-mail will convey the message, it does not substitute for the verbal tones and emotions inherent in a phone call, and does not convey the same message as one gets from eye to eye contact.
ReplyDelete