WORK-LIFE BALANCE, in 24X7 ENVIRONMENT

Foreword: Do you consider yourself as one of the best people leaders? We entrepreneurial leaders always think that we are exceptionally talented and have the best of management abilities.

Then why are our engagement scores dipping? Why are we having team-members who are only 15 per cent or even lower fully-engaged globally. Worse, in India it is nearly 10 per cent. A major dip. Current trends prove our myth of being the best.

Work-Life Balance in Relation to Parable of Age: I am a firm believer that due to different social structures, our age-variance, technology variance, generation gaps, information gap, etc.; every age-group has different needs. The engagement plan should also therefore be different. Isn’t it?

It is just a misconception that elder workforce needs more work-life balance due to their social needs. Work-life balance, is the question which equally bad scores across all generations and industries.

24X7 Service Structure: When we are customers; we demand for round the clock services. We expect our calls to be picked, on the other hand, don’t want to pick up the calls ourselves at odd hours. If you ask me this is the biggest challenge? People leaders are left with no choice, then to engage 24X7 services, even if it is at a higher cost.

Feet-Forward: Solutions are always in the question itself or very near.…Use common-sense and be smart. We have concierge which are very useful for guest. Can we use the same concept for the employees?

Can we engage families too, apart from only engaging our teams? It may enable you to build a support system, when an employee decides to leave. A family member, might give him a feedback, in terms of not to leave the company.

Can we look at work to order relationship? Depending on our business look at employing differently? The answers are quite there. We especially in India, need to look at the youngsters, currently teenage, and would be our workforce soon. Their trends, their needs and how do they react to 24X7 atmosphere would be important in creating the right work-life balance.

Engaging Differently: Just as a casting director, engages a particular actor for a role keeping in mind the story of the movie, the age bracket he fits in and his potential to do the justice to the role; similarly, leaders play a pivotal role in identifying the right actors, ‘Match the Age’, their potential, needs; to do justice with their assigned jobs. In other words, ‘Keep them Engaged’ and extract the best productivity out of them. Several business conclusions can be drawn from this parable. I herewith purpose my new book, ‘Match the Age’ to ‘Keep them Engaged’.