Leading for Work+Life Integration

Organizations can no longer afford to look away.

Today we live in a world where our personal lives are full-time jobs right alongside the full-time jobs of our professional lives. In our 24/7 always on connected environments, our personal lives follow us into work just as our work has been following us into our homes. Never again will we see a time where we have a clean line delineating our home life from our work life. We actually left that line behind in the 1950’s but have been pretending for decades that we could still separate the two. Now, thanks to the pandemic, the truth has been unearthed. People simply don’t have enough time for all that is life and our lives are complex and complicated with multiple competing priorities. Plus, research shows that the single most important thing for millennials in their jobs is work-life balance.

Organizations can no longer afford to look away. They can’t look away from their employees’ family and caregiving demands, they can’t look away from the unpaid labor that goes into running a house and family, they can’t look away from the need for employees to breathe and care for their own health with intentional time offline. They can’t look away from the fact that life is not easy and that organizations must begin to overtly acknowledge this –that effective work+life integration is a game-changer for employees. De-stigmatizing the time that people need to care for their personal lives alongside their professional lives is an important starting point.

However, organizations also cannot look away from the fact that they need their businesses to thrive and flourish too. Organizations need their employees to be engaged, productive, and happy. After all, business IS ultimately about the striving for profitability (and hopefully also solving an important problem for society too). But, profitability at the expense of employee health & wellness will no longer be tolerated in this new world. So, how do we do this? How do we clear the path for BOTH to happen –employee happiness/wellness and profitability?

This is where the power of teams and their leaders come in. Good teams with good leaders can change the trajectory of productivity and engagement in BOTH work and in life. Good teams with good caring leaders understand that work+life integration and give and take are the backbone of success and thriving. Teams exist for a reason (to bring together a group to collaborate towards a common goal) but when they are not well-oiled and/or when team members do not feel heard, understood, or safe to express their views, we have a problem – your company has a problem.

At THG, we coach teams and leaders (through group and individual coaching) to develop an environment of psychological safety, where trust and connection are felt, where the ability to effectively integrate work+life becomes fluid and normalized.

We help organizations be better, do better.