Yes!!! Of course!! I cannot believe that I didn’t ever use this term myself.
For years I have been telling anyone who would listen how ridiculous the term “work-life balance” is and how misguided attempts to champion it are. I even wrote about this in my book “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and included this picture to illustrate my point!
My aversion to the term was never because I did not recognise the need for people to have interests outside of their work, but simply because it creates an artificial degree of separation. As I wrote, “It makes work and life appear to be opposites, and since the opposite of life is death, it effectively makes work synonymous with death and reinforces the perception that work is a necessary evil that deprives one of (a) life. Thus it creates an attitude whereby work is something that, wherever possible, is to be avoided.” Certainly it makes work something that you have to endure rather than enjoy.
So I disparaged the term because of the segregation it created. Yet, I never recognised that the answer was ‘work-life integrity!’ Doh! How stupid! Yet it all became so obvious when I read this article recently.
But there is no point in beating myself up for my failure to come up with this improved explanatory term. Instead I am grateful for this new insight which will make my message so much easier in future. I am grateful too that there are others out there who are also banging the drum. And I am even more grateful for the proof of that and the opportunity to share this article with you. I trust that you find it thought-provoking.
And more than that, I hope that it will help you to see that your current initiatives to promote work-life balance are possibly misdirected. After all, it is always more difficult to come up with effective solutions when your initial premises are wrong. Hopefully your new insight will help you move in the right direction.
Although right now you are probably asking yourself, “What difference does it make? Whether I call it work-life balance or work-life integrity, it is still something that I have to instigate, instil and inspire in my employees. That has not been easy. And the change does not make it appear any easier.”
But that is where you would be wrong.
It is actually dead simple. And the answer lies in employee ownership.
Think for a moment about employee ownership. It is widely considered to be the best method of engaging employees. Why? Surely it is because it does more than anything else to integrate a person’s work with their life.
That is why I can claim that, even though I never articulated it as such, work-life integrity is what has fuelled all my efforts for the past few years. Furthermore it underpins my whole model of greater employee engagement through employee ownership and is what inspired my whole new employee ownership model.
More significantly though, my model offers universal employee ownership. And because it makes all employees owners it not only offer something no other employee ownership model does, it also offers ‘organisational integrity’! And that is a term and a concept I have been promoting!