My work life balance
It was a nice day when I wrote this. I took coffee in a vacuum flask, put on my boots and headed to a rock where I could sit and write this on my smart phone in the fresh air.
When do we work?
So we agreed in the last article that “bring your own device” had its ups and downs (Technology and Bring Your Own Device – Part 1 – Octagon Technology). Today we are going to look at how being connected to work continually can impact on the business and on the people.
When it comes to the one-person or owner managed micro-business – generally the people in those small organisations want to be connected and interacting with their business night and day, but it is important to schedule your time. There may be issues with significant others and children about you always being at work and you have to work that out. Diana’s and my solution when our children and company were young was to take separate holidays where one parent took all the children. When having “family time” the “no work rule” was enforced vigorously. Whoever could finish work at 17:30 started cooking dinner, and that included the children when they were old enough.
Today Diana’s and my problem is slightly different – when do we expect our employees to action phone calls and messages? To some extent we let them police this themselves – we have had discussions with our team and we have all agreed how to deal with out-of-hours-calls. We provide weekend and even 24/7 support for some clients and the arrangements we have work to cover these commitments.
But this may not work in your situation – so what do you need to do to find that “work-life-balance” for your people. Here are a few ideas:
- Use an answering service to filter and direct calls – we use this system all the time – we find it enables us to deliver high value to our clients
- Have a system in place that stops calls and emails reaching people whilst on leave – but arrange to be able to contact key staff whilst they are away just in case
- Allow staff to ring-fence time not to be disturbed
- We work flexi-hours – this enables our people to start work later if they work late the day before
- Write down what you expect of your team – when and what
- Remember you are benefitting from your team using their own devices – work with them
Infrastructure, and policies and procedures are important to make this work – we can help you with this. If you have time to spare away from your business and want to work on these yourself then here are some of our articles that can help:
Kamila has also written an article looking at this subject.
And that leads nicely into part three where I am going to talk about data loss, privacy and working on the beach.
Clive Catton MSc (Cyber Security) – by-line and other articles
Photo © Clive Catton www.clivecatton.co.uk
