Life Balance / Getting It Right
Why Get Your Work Life Balance Right?
Getting ones work life balance right is a tricky thing to achieve. It involves thinking carefully about what you want in life. It requires an objective appreciation of your own abilities. In carrying out this sort of thinking you are in essence taking control of your life.
Work life balance is about prioritising what is important to you. It may even be about changing your mind set completely about how you approach work and leisure time or going back into education and career changing.
It is not only individuals who are becoming more and more interested in work life balance. Employers are also beginning to see the benefits of work life balance to their companies. The change of demographics in Great Britain means that there are less young people coming through to take up the jobs that the country has available. In saying that immigrant working will take up this slack is actually talking about the work life balance choices of people from other lands.
Employers are beginning realise that if they are to value the expertise they have they must wake up to making work a more flexible and attractive proposition or loose their work force to other things. Even attracting workers from other lands requires serious thought as to how attractive to make the work and living conditions against how long you may want them to stay. In that respect work life balance may be seen as integrating life into the Grand Tour that seems so popular in the culture of youth today.
Time management is important to the work life balance. Working hours in Great Britain are some of the longest in Europe. This is not because we produce more Britain has low production levels compared to come of our European neighbours. What we do suffer from is a warped view of the Christian Work Ethic. Instead of making work a central part of our lives as a contribution to life and society it has become a benchmark for our own importance and how we are viewed by others.
Deciding how much time one wishes to allocate to work does not mean to say that work is not important. It is more likely to be a stress management technique. If Britain is known for its over-blown working hours then perhaps a better gauge would be productivity. In measuring productivity on an individual basis not only can the individual gauge their own effectiveness but the employer can negotiate the most profitable outcome for them and for the individual concerned.
Work life balance articles are prone to look at career / job changes – taking less money to have more time at home. There is much in the press about relocating to improve your lifestyle. This is an element of work life balance but not for every one. Only a small number of people can alter their work life balance by selling up and starting again.
Those with family commitments can only approach changes to improve their work life balance from the position of careful thought. The decisions must be about how many compromises you are going to make; how it will affect you and those who depend upon you. It is always difficult to foresee the future and one can only take chances in the short term, especially if it does mean taking a cut in salary of changing career entirely.
Many people have work life balance decisions thrust upon them due to ill health, redundancy or economic necessity. This can make a change to their work life balance something of a bitter pill to swallow. Therefore, how one approaches changing work life balance requires deep personal reflection. Thoughts about what one is trying to achieve and making the best of the resources available must be a fundamental part of this.
This course is designed to help you think about what it means to make changes to your work life balance. It is a course to make you think – in some respects to learn to think and to be positive about the future.