Teach people to integrate work and life together to avoid burnout.
The hero and martyr culture is sadly being revived. This is not good. It will lead to growing instances of poor mental health and burnout.
There are repeated reports of companies demanding return to the office for employees, and some martyr companies demanding 60 or even 80 hours a week. This runs counter to what we learned during the covid years; that people could be trusted to do the right thing, and integrate their home and work lives to the advantage of both staff and employer.
Yes, some people did take advantage of the system, and worked for two or more companies, and did less than they said. This does not mean work from home is a bad idea. It means some people took advantage of the way the system was set up. This should not condemn the whole approach.
Integrate your roles for a smoother life
Balance is an illusion. It suggests you can parcel things into boxes and find equilibrium. Work and daily life can be pigeonholed into spaces. This is wrong. I prefer to use an integration metaphor.
Integration is smoother and easier to organise: on my way to work I can drop off kids at school. While I’m making breakfast I can make lunches too, while bread is toasting. I can do things with the family now, and do my work things later. I can go into the office earlier than normal, and leave early to visit the dentist.
People should be able to integrate work and their personal lives. This means working, or studying 35 to 40 hours a week as part of their salary. Maybe even a 4-day week, if they’re lucky to have an employer that does this.
Doing overtime is unhealthy for people and the business
Going full-tilt for too long burns people out as stress and lack of sleep and other factors affect the mind and body. Pulling all-nighters as students works now and then, but not as a long term strategy. This was also captured in the Kent Beck’s ‘Extreme Programming explained: Embrace Change’ in 2000. Do a bit of overtime one week, but not a second week. If you still need this, then you have bigger problems, as he writes there. You want a sustainable pace.
Forcing people to work longer hours and to have no social life suggests the business is trying to micromanage everything, and sees people as interchangeable instead of as individuals. They want to see people in the office as they don’t trust them if they can’t see them. Yes, this means the person working two, or three jobs simultaneously, will be caught out, but at what price?
The university equivalent is the removal of video lecture recordings. This punishes those who need to review lectures for language, or miss lecture due to illness or family commitments. It does nothing for attendance either as students have other commitments such as family carer, or work obligations.
Tired people are unimaginative, and might fall into ‘fight, flight, freeze’ mode too. This means they miss opportunities and follow regular practice. This is not the path to success. This is the path of least resistance, and mediocracy, or poor quality. Under stress, you tend to fall into regular habits that feel ‘safe’, and comfortable. That is not when you try adventurous new ideas.
It is better to provide space and time for people to recharge themselves with time away from work and study. This also allows the opportunity and possibility of discovery too. Knowledge work suggests you never leave work in the office, it’s always in the background ready to interfere with your movie watching. This is where the integration comes into its own. You can read that work related ‘fun’ book while lounging in the bath, or on the beach.
Guide people to integrate their work and daily life
Teach students to integrate their coursework with their own lives, and employees to integrate their daily life with their work. Teach people how to have fun at work too.
Flexibility allows whole person to be present and arrange work to suit their needs in line with business goals and obligations. Guide people in how they might do this, and they will lead happier lives.
For a team this means teaching them to do things together instead of doing parts separately. Integrate work and do some social things together to learn more about each other, so that you can help each other.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.