The Work-Life Paradigm is Dead, Thankfully
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
As Americans, we worked very hard to separate our work selves from our personal selves inventing terms like “work-life balance“ as if work is not part of life, and life is everything besides work. Even when the digital revolution put work into our pockets on our phones, we still pretended like we could and should balance these two identities.
As a woman, I grew up hearing feedback like: keep your emotions out of the office, don’t mention you have a child during an interview, etc. The overall message: be less human because humanity and business don’t mix.
I’d gotten pretty good at being Work-Lisa at work and Life-Lisa outside of work. But when I began working out of my bedroom at a desk I shared with my partner with our toddler laughing or screaming on the other side of the door during quarantine, I realized how counterproductive and counterintuitive this paradigm is.
If this pandemic leaves us with anything worthwhile it’s that we are whole humans who can’t break ourselves up into little pieces, and being human doesn’t hurt business. On video calls we’re colleagues, clients, managers, parents to kids, pets, and plants. We have ups and downs, we have mental health and physical health challenges and finally, we are beginning to talk about them in workplaces and spaces.
Before we apologized about home life, doctor’s appointments, kids school events, but now we integrate work with our lives and we are feeling happier and more productive. The research backs up these conclusions (hello, hybrid work).
We’re whole people with fluid identities and now that the cat is out of the bag, I hope this is a workplace reckoning. We must design our workplaces and processes around people, their flexible identities and let it all mix up together.
The playwright, Sarah Ruhl sparked this connection for me in the last essay of her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write. She says in the most beautiful prose:
“When I watch my children play, and they are at one moment a self-proclaimed mean turtle and then a nice turtle and then a grown man, each fiercely and completely, it reminds me of the primary human hope that identity might in fact be fluid,...And if identity is fluid, then we might actually be free.”
How has your workplace allowed you to integrate your identities, or to be freer during this difficult time?
For leaders and executives, what ways have you let your teams be more free and what has been the result? What else could you be doing to support your people?