In recent years, tens of thousands of CEOs and business leaders have shared their thoughts on work-life balance. Conferences, professional workshops, management training courses and internal strategy making discussions have revolved around this topic. Following women's equality in the workplace and environmental issues, this topic has become a particularly popular topic for corporate responsibility (CSR) projects. In many multinational companies, internal teams, PR and HR staff are beginning to grapple with it. Short-term and then increasingly long-term initiatives were launched, and internal communication campaigns were currently underway in this area.
However, while some CEOs believe that creating and maintaining work-life balance is extremely important, other CEOs absolutely hate the term, and even A lie, an imaginary problem called
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon Already referenced in 2018: Harmony should be sought rather than balance In reconciling work and private life. If someone feels happy at home, it gives them energy and makes them more productive at work, and vice versa. We must conceive of work and private life not as mutually weakening spheres, but as mutually reinforcing spheres.
Arianna Huffington, founder of Thrive Global and HuffPost Efficiency, productivity and convenience should not be viewed as opposing forces. If we make progress in one area of our life, the same will happen in the other area. According to a 2019 Oxford University study, happy employees are 13% more productive than those who are unhappy. Employees should focus more on treating work and private life as a complex system, because “we bring our whole selves to work.”
However, according to Huffington Privacy should always come first. Although work is obviously important because it can give purpose and meaning to our lives, it should not cut off too much of our private sphere, or even push it completely into the background.
Lies, falling behind and losing battles
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google In a lecture he gave at Stanford University He slammed hard Google's remote work policy and the company's pursuit of work-life balance, saying they have contributed to the tech giant falling behind artificial intelligence startups like OpenAI.
Google decided that work-life balance, going home early, and working at home were more important than winning. Startups succeed because the people there work a lot
– said the former head of Google in the recording, which was published on the Internet a few months after he said it. He added: Anyone who wants to build a successful business today would not allow their employees to work from home and would only come to the office one day a week. After his comments caused serious backlash, Schmidt took back his words.
Thesonda Brown Duckett, CEO of Teachers Insurance & Annuities of America – University Retirement Equity Fund (TIAA), which provides private financial retirement services, and a Nike board member in 2023, put it bluntly:
Work-life balance is a lie.
She has been struggling with guilt herself, trying to balance her difficult leadership duties with motherhood. However, she now sees her life as a portfolio in which she has to perform different roles – as a mother, wife and business manager – but only one role at the same time. Although she can't always be physical with her kids, she says she tries to make sure she is when she is with them. Be able to give them full attention.
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Is remote work unethical?
He is known to be a workaholic Elon Musk He expects his subordinates to be the same. In 2022, immediately after its acquisition of X, Twitter's predecessor, it sent an email to employees saying: They either devote their lives to work or leave the company. He allegedly made X employees work 84 hours a week.
According to him, the option of remote work, which improves the balance between work and private life, is completely morally wrong.
According to the Tesla leader's own admission, he works 120 hours a week, that is, more than 17 hours a working day. Naturally, his lifestyle is not family friendly. His first wife, Justine, told me that although they lived in a luxury villa of several thousand square feet overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Bel Air, California, and were served by five employees, even at home, her husband was only concerned with work. . Although they regularly mingled with the elite of American social life—actors, athletes, politicians—Elon's thoughts were almost always elsewhere. When she spoke about their relationship after the divorce, she told Marie Claire: “I often told him that I was his wife, not his employee, and he told me that if I had been his employee, he would have fired me.”
According to Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk, the billionaire was the same in the beginning as he is today He often sleeps inside at Tesla or even on Twitter so that he can finish work as late as possible and start the next day as soon as possible.
The idea of lying on the beach as my main activity is the worst thing I could imagine. It looks terrible. I'll be screwed. This requires them to be heavily sedated. I like oversized things
Musk claims for himself.
One of the richest people in China, Co-founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma She also defended Work Order No. 996, which was criticized by many people. In this model, employees work 6 days a week from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., i.e. 72 hours a week.
According to Jack Ma, the 996 culture is a huge blessing. When does a person work so much and so on if not in his youth? “When you find a job you love, the 996 problem doesn't exist. If you don't passionately love what you do, every minute you spend working is torture.” The Chinese government has banned the highly burdensome 996 work order in 2021, although it is suspected it will still be expected in many Chinese companies.
Naturally, there are examples at the other end of the scale: for example, Yu Donglai, founder and president of the retail chain Bang Dong Lai, introduced measures aimed at improving the work-life balance of employees with a rather extreme measure. According to the entrepreneur's idea, since a happy employee is the key to running a successful business, an unhappy employee can take up to 10 additional days off.
The cover image is an illustration. Cover image source: Getty Images
