Get the Balance Right

Many people have been working from home during the pandemic. In fact many of them are still working from home for at least part of their working week.

For most of these people, this has been great for their work-life balance.  They have been better able to balance the demands of their work with other responsibilities - family, childcare and so on.

Work-life balance has been a ‘hot topic’ for a number of years. Some industries became ‘toxic’ and made unreasonable demands on staff, expecting attendance (real or virtual) over extended hours.  This was made worse by the availability of technologies which kept people in contact with the workplace over (and beyond) those extended hours.

The problem is that the working-from-home aspect of the pandemic has tipped the work-life balance too far away from work.  We hear rumours of lots of people ‘quiet quitting’ - working the minimum they can get away - very low productivity.

So, firms now have the tricky problem of moving the pivot back towards work without antagonising staff to the point where the quiet quitting becomes much louder.

The balance might not move back into the toxic zone but it needs to move back into the productivity zone!