Balance in the Real World: When Work Leaves Room for a Life

45 minutes ago

11 min read

There was a time when being constantly available for work was practically a competitive sport. Working through lunch meant you were dedicated. Answering emails at 10 PM meant you were committed and possibly next in line for that big promotion. Coming to work sick proved you were indispensable, and having a zillion unused vacation days at the end of the year was somehow a flex instead of a cry for help.

Thankfully, we're starting to question some of those assumptions.

Most of us now understand, at least in theory, that human beings require things like sleep, relationships, movement, fresh air and the occasional hour during which nobody from work needs anything from us. We know that someone who is chronically exhausted and stretched too thin isn't going to perform at their best indefinitely. And yet, plenty of workplaces still operate in ways that make achieving any semblance of balance feel like an advanced-level time management challenge.

Oftentimes the problem isn't an official policy at all. An organization might offer four weeks of vacation, flexible work arrangements and perfectly reasonable working hours on paper, while maintaining a culture where employees feel guilty actually using any of them. A leader might tell their team, "Don't give work a second thought while you're away!" and then find themselves responding to emails poolside in Mexico. Employees may technically be entitled to a lunch break, but if everyone else routinely inhales a sandwich over their keyboard, actually leaving the building to eat yours can start to feel like you're breaking an unwritten rule.

That's because workplace balance is about much more than vacation days and whether you can duck out for a dentist appointment without feeling like you've thrown the entire operation into chaos. It's about whether people genuinely feel there is room in their lives for both their work and everything else that matters to them.

None of us is only an employee. We're also parents, partners, friends, siblings, caregivers, neighbours, volunteers, athletes, musicians, gardeners, hockey coaches, dog owners and people who occasionally need to buy groceries. Those parts of our identities don't disappear when we walk through the workplace door or log into our computer in the morning. In fact, the lives we lead outside of work give us perspective, connection, purpose, skills and experiences that we bring back into it.

A psychologically healthy workplace recognizes the whole person and understands that having a full life outside of work doesn't diminish someone's commitment to what they do inside it.

And that brings us to Psychosocial Factor #11: Balance.

If you've been following along with my How to Eat an Elephant series, we're working our way through the 13 psychosocial factors identified within Canada's National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. The idea behind this series is simple: creating a psychologically healthy and safe workplace can feel enormous when we look at the whole thing at once, so we're eating the proverbial elephant one bite at a time.

For each factor, we're looking at what it actually means, why it matters and, most importantly, what organizations can realistically do to strengthen it. This time, we're talking about Balance, and I think it's one of the factors that can reveal a particularly interesting gap between what an organization intends and what employees actually experience.

Most employers want their people to have balance. The challenge is making sure the everyday experience of work supports that intention.

What Do We Actually Mean by Balance?

When we hear "work-life balance," it's easy to picture a perfectly divided scale: eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep and eight hours for everything else. Presumably this imaginary person also meal preps every Sunday, drinks eight glasses of water a day and has never forgotten to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer. The rest of us know life doesn't divide itself quite that neatly!

There will be weeks when work demands more from us. There may be a major project, a busy season, an important deadline or an unexpected problem that requires extra attention. There will also be seasons when life outside work demands more. A child gets sick. A parent needs care. Someone moves, gets divorced, goes back to school, welcomes a baby or simply hits a stretch where keeping all the plates spinning requires considerably more effort than usual.

Balance doesn't mean every part of our lives receives a perfectly equal share of our attention every day. It means that, over time, the demands of work leave enough capacity for us to have a life outside of it.

That's an important distinction because conversations about balance can quickly run into legitimate operational questions. How much flexibility is actually possible? What happens when coverage is required? What about jobs that have to happen at a particular time or place? Those are fair questions.

Supporting balance doesn't mean abandoning operational requirements, eliminating deadlines or pretending every job can offer unlimited flexibility. It means looking for reasonable ways to meet organizational needs while also recognizing that employees have needs and responsibilities outside of work.

The Policy Isn't Always the Problem

One of the most interesting things about balance is how strongly it can be influenced by unwritten rules.

Imagine two organizations with identical vacation policies. Both provide employees with four weeks of vacation every year. At Organization A, leaders take their vacation, disconnect while they're away and encourage their teams to do the same. Work is redistributed or deprioritized so employees aren't greeted by an inbox containing 684 new emails and an immediate desire to return to the airport when they get back.

At Organization B, everyone has the same four weeks on paper, but people have gradually developed a habit of checking in while they're away. Maybe nobody ever explicitly asked them to. Maybe it started during a particularly busy period and simply became the norm. Before long, employees are returning from vacation needing another vacation just to recover from returning from vacation!

Technically, both organizations provide exactly the same benefit. In practice, the experience of balance is completely different.

The same thing can happen with flexible work arrangements, sick time, lunch breaks and after-hours communication. An organization can have excellent policies while everyday habits unintentionally send a different message.

That's why leaders need to pay attention to the behaviour they're modelling. If you send an email at 11 PM, you may genuinely have no expectation that anyone responds until morning. But does your team know that? If you're answering messages from the swim-up bar on vacation because you prefer to stay connected, could someone on your team interpret that as the standard they're expected to meet too?

These aren't signs of bad leadership. They're examples of how easily workplace norms develop without anyone deliberately creating them.

Sometimes supporting balance isn't about introducing another policy. It's about making it genuinely comfortable to use the ones you already have.

Flexibility Doesn't Mean a Free-for-All

Flexibility has become a major part of conversations about work-life balance, but it's sometimes treated as an all-or-nothing proposition. Either everyone works whenever and wherever they want or nobody can ever be flexible because the organization still has to function. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of territory between those two options.

For some workplaces, flexibility might mean remote or hybrid work. For others, that's simply impossible. A nurse can't provide bedside care from their living room, a construction worker can't build a bridge remotely and a restaurant can't tell customers their steak will be prepared via Zoom.

But flexibility can take many forms. Maybe someone can adjust their start and finish times. Maybe appointments can be accommodated without forcing an employee to use a vacation day. Perhaps shifts can be swapped more easily, compressed workweeks are possible or employees can occasionally modify their schedules around family responsibilities. When considering flexibility it's important not to assume something can't be done just because we haven't done it before. Let's get comfortable thinking outside the box.

The question isn't necessarily, "Can we give everyone complete flexibility?" A much more useful question is, "Where do we have flexibility that we aren't currently using?"

The answer will look different in every workplace, and that's OK.

When Your Office Lives in Your Pocket

Technology has made work easier in countless ways. Unfortunately, it has also given work the ability to follow us into our kitchens, bedrooms, cars, a beach in Aruba and our children's hockey games. Our office now lives in our pocket.

For many employees, physically leaving the workplace no longer means leaving work. Email notifications appear while they're eating dinner. Teams messages arrive while they're watching TV. A quick glance at an email before bed becomes 45 minutes spent mentally drafting tomorrow's response while their partner asks, "Are you even listening to me?"

Sometimes employees are expected to be available after hours because that's genuinely part of the job (and they're compensated for it in a concrete way). Other times, nobody has actually established an expectation at all. People simply develop their own assumptions based on what they see others doing.

Ontario has actually taken steps to formally address this issue. Since 2022, employers with 25 or more employees have been required under the Employment Standards Act to have a written policy on disconnecting from work. The legislation defines disconnecting as being free from work-related communications, including emails, phone calls and messages. It's worth noting that the legislation doesn't create a blanket "right to disconnect" or prohibit after-hours communication. Rather, it requires employers to actually establish a policy around it.

And regardless of whether your organization is in Ontario or legally required to have such a policy, there's a useful idea here for every workplace: What are our expectations around disconnecting? If nobody has ever answered that question, employees will probably answer it for themselves based on what they see everyone else doing.

Organizations can help by creating clear norms around communication outside working hours. What actually requires an immediate response? What can wait until tomorrow? Are employees expected to monitor messages during evenings, weekends or vacation? If someone chooses to work at unusual hours because it suits their schedule, could they use the handy little "schedule send" button so colleagues know a late-night email isn't an invitation to start working too?

Clear expectations give people permission to disconnect without requiring leaders to stop working in whatever way works best for them.

Balance Is Also a Workload Issue

Of course, we can't talk seriously about balance without talking about workload.

You can encourage people to take lunch breaks, use their vacation and log off at five until you've printed it on mugs, T-shirts and inspirational posters in the break room. But if there's routinely ten hours of work to fit into an eight-hour day, the math just isn't mathing.

This is where the psychosocial factors begin to overlap. Earlier in this series, we looked at Workload Management, and it's closely connected to Balance. If people consistently have more work than can reasonably be completed within their working hours, something has to give. Eventually, the overflow lands somewhere: evenings, weekends, vacation time, sleep, family time or personal wellbeing.

This can be surprisingly difficult for leaders to spot. An employee may consistently deliver excellent work without anyone realizing they're quietly putting in another 10 or 15 hours every week to make it happen. From the outside, everything looks great. The work is getting done, deadlines are being met and there doesn't appear to be a problem.

That's why it's worth paying attention not only to whether the work is getting done, but also to what it takes for people to get it done. Great performance is much more valuable when it can be sustained.

Life Happens During Business Hours

Here's another inconvenient truth about being a human: an astonishing amount of life insists on happening between 9 and 5.

Dentists are open. Doctors schedule appointments. Banks call. Schools hold meetings. Children get sick. Parents need help. Furnaces break. Cars make noises that definitely weren't there yesterday. Somehow the government office you need always seems to operate during exactly the same hours you do.

Sometimes people need to deal with life while they're technically supposed to be working.

When employees have very little latitude to handle those things, relatively ordinary situations can become significant sources of stress. A 45-minute medical appointment suddenly requires the strategic planning of a small military campaign.

Of course, not every workplace can accommodate every request. Operational realities are real, and certain jobs require people to be in specific places at specific times. But where flexibility is possible, a little humanity can go a long way.

It tends to work both ways too. Employees who know their workplace will give them some grace when life happens are often much more willing to give some grace back when work needs something extra from them.

Leaders Set the Temperature

If you're a leader, one of the most powerful things you can do to support balance is model it yourself.

Take your vacation. Eat lunch somewhere other than directly above your keyboard occasionally. Go home. Talk about the things you enjoy outside work. If you need to leave early for your kid's soccer game, don't act as though you've somehow become less committed to your job because of it. When you're sick, stay home when you can.

None of this means leaders should pretend their jobs aren't demanding. In fact, leadership roles can make maintaining balance particularly challenging. It simply means demonstrating that having boundaries isn't incompatible with being ambitious, responsible or deeply committed to your work.

It's also worth paying attention to the language that develops around boundaries. If someone leaves at the end of their scheduled day and hears, "Must be nice," that communicates something, even if it was intended as a harmless joke. If someone takes their full vacation allotment and feels they need to apologize for it, that's worth noticing too.

Culture is built in those tiny moments, often without anyone realizing how significantly they're contributing to it.

What Can Organizations Actually Do?

Improving balance doesn't necessarily require launching a major initiative, hiring a committee or developing a 312-page Workplace Balance Strategic Action Framework. Sometimes the best place to start is simply by looking at the everyday experience of work.

Are employees regularly working outside their scheduled hours? Are vacation days going unused? Do people feel comfortable taking their breaks? Are workloads achievable within the hours people are being paid to work? Are flexible arrangements available where they make sense? Do leaders respect boundaries and model them themselves?

Better yet, ask your team! What makes it difficult for them to balance work with the rest of their lives? Their answers may surprise you. Sometimes the solution will require a significant policy or operational change, but sometimes it's remarkably simple: adjusting a meeting time, improving vacation coverage, allowing a slightly different start time or clarifying expectations around after-hours email.

Most importantly, be careful about how we define commitment. The employee who arrives first, leaves last, never takes vacation and answers emails all weekend isn't necessarily more committed than the person who consistently does excellent work and leaves on time. There may be all kinds of reasons those two employees work differently.

The goal isn't to create one "right" way to achieve balance. It's to create an environment where sustainable ways of working are possible.

Balance Makes Better Work Possible

We need to change the way we think about time away from work. Rest isn't time "stolen" from productivity. It's part of what makes sustained productivity possible.

People need opportunities to recover. They need relationships and interests that have nothing whatsoever to do with their jobs. They need sleep, movement, laughter, connection and sometimes an entire Saturday when nobody says, "Quick question..." followed by something that is neither quick nor technically a question.

Work can be enormously meaningful. If you've followed along with me for a while you know I certainly believe it can be a source of purpose, identity, connection and pride. But even meaningful work shouldn't require us to shrink the rest of our lives to make room for it.

Psychologically healthy and safe workplaces understand that employees are whole people. They consider not only what needs to get done, but also what conditions will allow people to continue doing great work over the long term.

That's what balance is really about. It's not doing less, caring less or lowering expectations. It's creating a way of working that people can actually sustain. When work leaves enough room for people to have a life, they often have a whole lot more to bring back to work.

Well, that's all for today, my friends! Next week, we're tackling Psychosocial Factor #12: Psychological Protection (aka psychological safety), and this is a big one. What happens when someone makes a mistake at work? Disagrees with their boss? Raises a concern? Admits they don't know something? Asks for help? Brings forward an idea that might be unpopular? Do people feel comfortable speaking up, or do they pause and wonder whether saying nothing might be the safer option?

Whether people feel safe in those moments tells us an awful lot about a workplace. Next week, we'll look at what psychological safety actually means, what it doesn't mean and how organizations can create environments where people feel safe enough to be honest, ask questions, make mistakes, raise concerns and contribute their ideas.

Thanks for reading!

Elizabeth Eldridge is a Psychological Health & Safety Consultant based in southern New Brunswick, Canada. In addition to keynote speaking, event emceeing, consulting services and corporate training on mental health in the workplace, she supports organizations across the country on the adoption of Canada’s best practice guidelines on psychological health and safety management. She is also the Founder & President of Arpeggio Health Services which provides standardized education programs like Mental Health First Aid, The Working Mind, QPR Suicide Prevention and more.