'Balance'​ in an Organizational Framework

‘Balance’​ in an Organizational Framework

 

(Republished. Originally published on LinkedIn dated Dec 2016)

I wrote my last post on 'A Sense of Balance' in July last year. Since then I have been waiting myself to continue writing the second part, which I was not sure when and what would come out of it. However I have been reading that post again last couple of days and refreshing myself on my mindset at that time when I wrote it. I ended my post with this question:

“What could team member, project manager or senior management, organization do to bring this balance into its employees? We have seen our colleagues in HR work hard to bring some of the elements designed to bring in ‘work-life’ balance for the employees to feel more comfortable. But I believe it may not be effective or sometimes even a useless exercise because of an underlying paradigm.”

Probably this is what I should explore into in this post. So let’s see what comes out!

In certain context in life situations, we often hear the term “Only time will tell”. Times are changing. Since the time I wrote my earlier blog, a lot seems to have changed, perhaps not just at individual level but at the global level. The world apparently seems to be going ‘right’ and heading into more unpredictability. How are organizations going to adapt, and do business? How are earthlings going to ‘work’ and ‘live’? Will time alone tell?

Let’s go into a little into our past. By ‘past’ I mean few years before when things were ‘a little greener’. There were different ‘signs’ of our ‘imbalanced’ work culture in varying degrees across organizations. There were different problems of driving business growth, and aligning organization, employees and work culture towards maximizing growth with minimum resources.

The Human Resources (HR) teams were bridged broadly between the two sides – 
a) Organizational strategies and b) Employee Relations while still playing an integrated support role for the organization. They had to structure themselves in-order to have a smooth interface to the two sides – a) the management that focuses on the core business drivers and b) the ‘human’ ‘resources’ trying to maximize ‘productivity’ to improve ‘performance’ and ‘operational efficiency’. The top-end of the HR (siding more towards the ‘management’ side as they too were part of the management and the lower-end ‘listen’ to employees while mostly performing ‘administrative’ process relating to the ‘employability’ aspects. I am not a HR person, and I might be oversimplifying here. But I have my own reason for looking at HR this way. I will try to bring that out later in this post. But in this ‘past’ context which probably spanned over many years in varying degrees of their (HR) respective functions, HR teams were initially very successful in maintaining this bridge and focusing on their core functions. There were employee friendly policies, compensation, performance management, aspiration management and business too were riding towards the top of the charts. Probably the HR teams had one of the best ‘work-life’ balance! Change being constant, was slowly impacting business drivers and at the same time cultural aspects (see my earlier post) were impacting the working conditions and employee expectations. Organizational HR functions were fast aligning and making decisions to adapt to the changing business drivers, while Employee Relations teams worked hard to bridge the gaps and innovate Employee friendly initiatives. While the organizational function happened in a more direct mechanism with the business management, the employee relations part now had to scratch surfaces with the middle management layer to ensure the effectiveness of their initiatives. The paradigms were changing and consequently ‘stress’ developed in the organization layers. The more the layering in an organization, greater were the effect of that ‘stress’ as each layer added its own friction (viscosity). My observation and inference during this period (when most of my career was spent) was that employee friendly initiatives were less effective in the spirit of their initiatives, and more tuned towards ‘rising business growth’ as was in earlier times. As the change drivers were accelerating, the focus came down from ‘growth’ to ‘sustenance’ on one end and dwindled down from ‘managing aspirations’ to ‘performance motivation’.

I would like to go a little more into the past. Probably the genesis of HR itself. I derive this intuitively as I wasn’t working at that time. I haven’t heard of my father saying he interacted with his HR department, not even a ‘Personnel department’. I used to hear of ‘labor unions’ and ‘strikes’ when some policies were introduced impacting employees. Perhaps the ‘human resources’ were invented to avoid ‘labor unions’ and let management focus more on ‘organizational growth’ and created another ‘support function’. At the genesis all were pure! HR was siding more with the employees and with the spirit of representing employee concerns to the management. Perhaps this was the reason I viewed HR with the two ends! Further ‘outsourcing*’ of problem and solution leading into creating many layers in an organization seemed inevitable. And viscosity rules any flow! This detour into the distant past was to show my own perception of what I believed HR teams existed when I went to them during my early days of my career. (*outsourcing in this context of moving the problem management into another layer - perhaps an article on outsourcing at a later time!)

Looking at these times, if time can tell, let’s look at what could have worked well in the past and how changes impacting them could have been the root cause of the ‘work-life balance’ problem.

Individual/Team Member level

• Fixed work hours in a day thereby set manageable expectation from family and organization
• More natural ‘time management’ aspects of one’s life in terms of ‘regularity’ of individual duties (without overlapping work aspects)
• Work as part of life and providing a more similar work life across peers

Project/Middle Management level:

• Better ‘manageable’ productivity and compensatory expectations
• Weekly offs and compensatory offs helping to ‘balance’ out anomalies over larger spans of time
• ‘People Management’ functions having integrated well with ‘Project Management’ structures.

Senior/Leadership/Organizational level:

• Less layering in organization and more integrated functions giving quality time for business focus
• Better scalable model, perhaps due to underlying work environment
• Predictable market scenarios and ‘managed growth’ (in a limited sense)
• Organizational culture, Leadership by example in this aspect as well
• Empowering HR Business/ER to reverse trends and building 'real trust' with employees

Coming to the current situation, and at cusp of a new year with more uncertainties, will time tell? Can we make certain choices to correct the anomalies before it is too late before the situation turns cancerous? Or is it a too pessimistic view in a virtually imposed viewpoints and believe our leaders will make it happen for us? Or am I to make an individual choice with a more rigorous resolution backed by the enormous hope and faith in a process that echoes ‘a task well begun is half done’? Whatever! Equip yourself well and wishing you all well and very happy new year 2017! If you don’t mind my saying, do try something like this Heartfulness/masterclass event or watch this TED talk (I keep seeing this. Nigel says it very well) or forgive all my ramblings and enjoy your rest of the day!

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