Someone asked me about work life balance today.  I feel like that’s a question that gets brought up a lot, and the answers tend to be … trite.  They are usually something along the line of “You just need to take care of yourself” and “Unplug at the end of the day” (which is what I said at first).  I like McKeown’s phrasing of “Protect the asset,” but it still doesn’t quite tell you what to do exactly to create work/life balance.

I feel like my work/life balance is really good right now, but it hasn’t always been that way.  I thought back to a period of time when it was really poor, and what it took to correct it — I think this is a lot more instructive than whatever I do now.  What I do now is the result of years of tweaking the way I work.  But what were the first tweaks that gave me breathing room?  That’s what I’m going to talk about here.  It’s a roundabout path, though, so stick with me.

But first, I want to dispel one common misconception about work.

You can’t save a ship by bailing it out, no matter how hard you bail

A lot of new managers find themselves in a difficult position.  This could be because they inherited difficulties, or because they’re new to the job and it takes a bit to get situated.  Often work piles up and they end up spending long hours trying to get their heads above water — this is how it was for me with my first real management position.

I would wake up before six, get into the office by seven, work until four or five (or six), head home, spend a few hours with my family and then work from 9:00 PM until about 1:00 in the morning.  I’d get five hours or so of sleep, then do the whole thing again.

I thought that if I could just get through this one project, put out this one fire, solve this one person’s issue … if I could get those few things done I would get a breather.  If I just put in those extra hours I’d make some room for myself to get the lay of the land and figure things out.

But the long nights went on for months and months.  That’s because what I inherited was a boat with a big ol’ hole in it.  There were inefficiencies and blind-spots in the way we were working, and work was just pouring in.  I was bailing the water out, but it would never stop coming.  I assumed the problem was that I wasn’t bailing hard enough, and that if I could bail harder and longer I would get to a point where the boat was dry and back to normal.

But that’s not how bailing works.  Bailing is a stop-gap measure to keep the boat from sinking, but at some point you have to figure out where the water is coming from and stop it.  Sometimes that means you patch a small hole, sometimes you have to take the boat to a dry-dock and do some extensive work on it.  Depends on the boat, and the size of the rock you hit.

I can tell you one thing, though.  Bailing doesn’t fix holes.  Only stopping the bailing and focusing on fixing the holes fixes the holes.

The Perspective of a Manager

Managers shouldn’t be bailers anyway — they are hole fixers.

See, most people entering management are coming from a situation where they were in charge of something directly.  Maybe it was a system, a machine, a production line, a project, some standard daily tasks — whatever it was there was a thing, and you were in charge of that THING.

When I was a new manager, at least, I focused on things for too long.  I thought “I have to get these servers running, this network figured out, these wireless issues ironed out, these bugs squashed” — I was focusing on the things.

But managers are not in charge of things, they are in charge of people, and those people are in charge of things.

I talked in a previous blog post about how managers need to create clarity, standards and experiment on those standards until they find the best standard to perform the work.  That’s what they have to do with individual workers as well:

• Define clear responsibilities for roles so people know what they are expected to accomplish
• Create a system that allows the employee the space and support necessary to fulfill their responsibilities
• Improve the system over time so the employee is more efficient

Let’s get back to our boat example.  Let’s say you have a small boat with a limited crew.  Before you set out that morning on your … crabbing expedition, I guess … you give everyone assignments.

• Sailor 1 — in charge of driving the boat with the boat steering wheel
• Sailor 2 — in charge of keeping the engines running
• Sailor 3 — in charge of navigation and communication
• You — the captain.  You’re in charge of telling the sailors what to do so that you get MAXIMUM CRAB

The day is going great right up until you hit an iceberg (in Southern California?  Climate change, man, what are you gonna do?).  The boat begins taking on water and you tell Sailor 2 to start bailing.  They can’t handle it so you tell Sailor 3 to help out.  The water is still rising so you tell Sailor 1 to join in.  They’re all bailing as hard as they can, but the water is still rising.  What do you, captain of the good ship Crab Master, do?

As mentioned above, most new captains would grab a bucket and begin bailing.  Hopefully you see the problem with this — even if you keep the boat from sinking, you’re not going anywhere.  The engines aren’t running.  No one is navigating.  You will all be bailing seawater until you die from starvation (or the sharks get you, I guess — I forgot to mention the sharks in this story).

As the captain it’s your job to make sure your sailors can work.  You need to find the problem and fix it — you need to patch the hole.  Now, once the hole is patched you can pitch in and help bail the boat out, but if you jump straight to bailing you’re letting your sailors down — they just won’t realize it until one of them loses a leg to a shark who got into the boat via the iceberg hole.

I’m letting this metaphor get away from me.

Back on track, you are in charge of people, not things.  Take care of the people.

How do you take care of people?

I’m getting to work/life balance, trust me.  But we’re getting there by way of Carl Rogers.

Everyone has a different management style, so what I say here isn’t going to be universally applicable.  It is based on my experience.

Remember what the manager’s job is, as outlined above?  Give people clarity about their responsibilities, create a system that helps people fulfill their responsibilities, improve that system over time so people can be more efficient.

Here are some common practices that keep people from being efficient:

• Working long hours — this gives you a temporary boost in production, but long term it will reduce productivity, cause more errors and may lead to burnout
• Frequent task switching — every time you switch from one task to another you lose at least 20 minutes of productivity.  Someone who is asked to do three different things in one hour has basically lost the entire hour to task-switching penalties
• Moving goalposts — not only does this waste time, it is incredibly demoralizing
• Negative communication — this can be from customers/users directed at the people you manage, it could be from the people you manage directed at other, it could be among the people you manage.  All of the above increase stress and decrease productivity

We could list a million other things, but I’m going to bet that if you see one of these things, you see most of them.  They tend to cluster.  Like sharks.

If your people are doing those things, they aren’t working efficiently.  Basically, the business isn’t getting their money’s worth.

This is something that happens a lot, actually.  A business may pay a person’s salary, but they put requirements on that person that makes them less efficient, thus reducing the ROI on their money.  They may make the work so difficult that the person leaves, which costs a lot more money as it takes roughly 6 months for someone to be able to do a job effectively.  When someone leaves, you lose the six months they spent getting trained, and you must spend another six months training someone else.  

Let’s look just at the money here.  You are paying someone’s salary, asking them to work long hours or bad conditions and thus not getting their best work.  So let’s say that if you pay that person for a year, you get 10 months of work out of them.  The conditions can be so bad they leave, in which case you must pay for 12 more months.  You have just paid two years of salary, for ten months of work.

One of the manager’s jobs is frequently, unfortunately, to protect the business from themselves.

The sad part is the business doesn’t do this out of malice.  They usually do it out of ignorance.  This is especially prevalent in IT, where business management may not understand the work itself.

So here is the first key to taking care of your people and protecting the business from itself:

Help the business understand what is possible.

My experience has been that generally the business doesn’t know how much to expect from IT employees, so they continue to put work on them until they start getting complaints.  Many IT employees don’t want to complain, so they accept work until they are burned out.  They bail until they starve.

Or the sharks get them.

The point is, it is management’s responsibility to help the business understand exactly what they can expect from their investment in these people.  You need to set reasonable standards and make them absolutely clear to the business.

Going back to my experience, I had a small staff that managed a business with 17 locations spread out geographically (to drive from the two most distant locations would’ve taken about seven hours).  The locations were open late, and on weekends, and on holidays.  With only a few people we obviously couldn’t provide constant service, so I met with the managers of the locations and outlined what they could expect from us.  I don’t remember the exact details, but it was something like this:

• M-F, 9-6 we would respond within an hour to email tickets, 15 minutes to phone calls
• Every day from 6-11PM, and weekends from 9AM-11PM they could call our on-call number and expect a response within 15 minutes, but only for emergencies.  Any non-revenue impacting event would need to wait until the next day
• Holidays were treated like weekends unless special arrangements were made in advance

I explained to them that with the staffing we had that is the best we could do.  If they wanted to pay more we could staff up and offer quicker service, but that is the best our team could do in the current circumstances.  They said it seemed reasonable, and with a few hiccups along the way that’s how it went.  The hiccups led me to the second key to taking care of your people and protecting the people from itself:

Set a standard and make sure it is followed.

We had a standard, but it wasn’t always followed.  I would get emails at odd hours, and then a text asking me to check it and I would have to reply back and say “Please call the on-call number if this is an emergency, otherwise I’ll look at it tomorrow morning.”  Some employees would call team-members who weren’t on call directly on their cell phones because they just preferred working with them, or didn’t trust the on-call number.  I had to ask my team to stop putting their cell number in their signatures (and stop giving them out), and then I had to talk to these people and ask them not to do that.

I had to create a system that allowed the team to work effectively.  I had to continue improving that system little by little.  I had to take care of the people I managed so that they could provide the best work possible, and that also happened to protect the business from itself.

A critical piece of this is that we set a standard that we absolutely could live up to.  If we had set that standard, and then taken 7 hours to respond to phone calls, it obviously wouldn’t have worked.  If I’d corrected people at that point they would’ve laughed in my face and asked why we had a standard at all.  It would’ve been chaos.  Here’s where I would throw in another shark joke, but I’m running out of gas for this blog post.

How I developed work life balance

Now we finally get to the point where we talk about how I created work/life balance for myself.

Obviously a person, and a team, is more effective if they have a healthy work/life balance.  It’s easy to look at other people and understand that.  I’ve talked extensively about how taking care of your people, communicating what is possible, setting livable standards and enforcing them will improve productivity, increase the company’s ROI, decrease turnover and, in the long run, save the business from itself.

All those things also improve work/life balance.  They make people happier, they make their lives better, and thus they are generally more productive.

Once you’ve figured out how to take care of other people and keep them happy and productive there is just one final step: live the standards yourself.  Don’t just live them, exemplify them.  Enforce them!

Good managers don’t ask their team members to do something they wouldn’t do.  Normally we only think about that in regards to bad stuff like cleaning the head (that’s boat talk for toilet) or swabbing the poop deck (?) or securing the mizzenmast (???).  But it should also apply for good things.  How do you know if a standard is effective for your team if you aren’t also living it yourself?  How do you know you’ve created a system that is sustainable without first hand experience?

That was the last key.  I took care of my team, and then applied that same care to myself.  For me, at least, it was easier to know what was reasonable when I looked at someone else than when I looked at myself, but I was able to live the standards I set for others because I wanted them to truly internalize them.  I knew it was good for them, and I didn’t want to undercut those efforts by not being an example.

TL:DR

It’s basically the golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) except then you do unto yourself as you’re doing unto others.

Also there was an awesome boat metaphor that you missed if you skipped down to this TL:DR.  There were sharks.