Cali Yost

Earlier this week I met with a group of organizational change advocates, each of whom is dedicated to reshaping the relationship between work and life.

Work-Life issues per se aren’t really my gig, although I’ve had a fair amount of work-life conflict in my day as an employee and as a manager. However, I invited myself along to this strategy session because I’m convinced that work-life fit, synergy, resonance, whatever-we-call-it is something we have to address if organizations themselves are to be(come) more authentic.

I have noticed in my own organizational change work and in the perspectives of other consultants how often conversations about work-life strategies are kept at the sidelines. When we talk about how organizations can, will, or should change, we talk about technology, sustainability, flattening hierarchies, innovation, and so on, but we don’t talk about these opportunities in ways that pay attention to work-life issues.

Worse yet, we fail to remember that creating organizations with better work-life resonance is the only thing that will make any of these other initiatives effective.

You’d think that organizational change consultants, corporate strategists, and everyday leaders & managers would be interested in what is clearly the strategic initiative that would support and enable all others initiatives.

Instead, folks seem to be deterred from paying attention to work-life issues because we don’t ask each other to address the myths that make work-life a side issue and not a central issue.

These three myths are that (1) Work-Life is a women’s issue, (2) Work-life initiatives are only for employees who can’t keep up, and (3) Work-life initiatives are ‘nice to have’ but not critical. I wrote earlier, in The (Feminist) Business Bloggers’ Lament , about how sexism prevents us from considering work-life strategies, so let’s focus here on the other two myths.

Myth: Work-Life Initiatives are only for employees who can’t keep up.

When an employee needs some kind of flexibility in his or her work arrangement, managers and organizations implicitly assume that there is something “wrong” with that employee. After all, other employees can accept the constraints of the job as designed, so what’s his/her problem?

The employee who asks for flexibility is asking for ‘accommodation’ because he or she just can’t cut it.

We assume that the employee asking for flexibility is the exception. Every other employee fits quite nicely into the box we’ve created, right?

By focusing on the individual as the problem, rather than considering the role of the organizational system, we overlook what’s really the problem. What’s not cutting it is the relationship between how our organizations are designed and how human lives really are.

Our organizations are designed to ignore the realities of human lives. Our organizations are designed to create a competition between work and life, and then to stack the deck so that work wins.

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