It’s Not About Balance, It’s About People as a Whole

When we normally speak about work and personal balance, we imagine a scale, with work on one side and all the personal stuff on the other. It makes these elements look contrary to each other, or like things you need to sacrifice to bring balance to your life. For most people, however, it’s impossible to accomplish a healthy relationship between our jobs and personal life. Why?

When we establish work as separate from the personal, we are ignoring criteria that directly impact human development. The most obvious wouldbe achievements, raises, good evaluations or goals. However, the work environment is more complex than that. Even if we are making progress in our professional roles, proactive participation, communication between partners, adequate distribution of workload, or even regular working days impact our daily lives.

In 2018, Mexico took the first steps toward a positive work environment with the NOM-035. This initiative promotes regulation and policies to prevent psychosocial risk, workplace violence and a favorable organizational environment. This is a process of understanding how the enterprise's actions affect personal life and vice versa.

As founders, we have the responsibility of creating a better and healthy work environment. Nowadays, it is quite common to hear about “burnout syndrome” as a consequence of bad management of the roles of the people inside and outside of the organization, excessive workloads, and a lack of autonomy, among others. We need to understand that we are social entities that are nourished by our surroundings and that we influence others as well. Sometimes, we forget to understand people as associates and as part of an organization and society.

The burnout syndrome is difficult to understand because, as Christina Maslach states, each person uniquely expresses burnout. We know that burnout is a gradual process of loss during which the mismatch between the needs of the person and the demands of the job grows ever greater. It thrives when there is a major mismatch between the nature of the job and the person who does it. Most people think that it’s primarily a problem of the individual but as Maslach and other researchers have proven, burnout is not a problem of the people themselves but of the social environment in which people work.

For companies, it goes beyond providing “free time” or being flexible with personal space. It starts with a declaration of values, commitments to employees, and being consistent and impeccable with these commitments. What are the main concerns, how do we prevent the risk of burnout, and what is the company's main purpose? How can we have a positive impact on our society and how are employees a part of this?

The next question, then, is how do companies prevent this risk and promote a healthy and safe work environment? For one, consider the associate’s relationships and interpersonal bonds. The dissemination of information aimed at prevention or even how often and on what skills companies train their employees. We can go as far as providing regular psychosocial tests and counseling in case of risk.

If we consider workloads, who and how is providing leadership, social support, how we control workflows, how we communicate and provide new information, recognition of achievements, and, of course, work-family relations, organizations could be more integrated, have motivated employees and above all, complete people, where the job is only part of their lives and not the opposite of their family.