Why progressive HR leaders are building policies for full selves, not just work selves
There’s no such thing as work-life divide anymore, so help with it all
For most of the last five-hundred-odd years, companies have paid employees for their labour. This labour took the form of either output or time, but the deal was always clear: do the work, get paid, and then use your free time to pursue fulfilment and meaning. Only a very recent — in the grand scheme of things — plot twist has meant we’re now increasingly looking for such fulfilment and meaning inside the four walls of an office rather than outside them.
Because of this, for most of history we’ve split ourselves into a ‘work self’ and a ‘real self’. It was a church-and-state situation, with employees bottling up their personalities in the workplace. How employees behaved, felt and performed within working hours was what mattered; anything outside the 9 to 5 was frankly irrelevant. “Don’t bring work home, and don’t bring home to work” became a popular 50s adage.
Not only do we now derive more of our identity from the office, but we also take more of it home with us. More than half of Americans regularly check their emails after 11pm and whilst on holiday. Brits average 7.7 hours a week of unpaid overtime. On top of this, the nature of work itself is changing. Services, and in particular professional services, now dominate the economy. This means that an increasing number of employees have become the product they used to make. Employee wellbeing should always be important, but when your employees are the product it becomes business-critical.
Just as we can’t put down our work phones at home, we can’t turn off our personal lives in the office. A survey of 4,000 working adults by the Mental Health Foundation last year found that the causes of work-affecting stress often come from our personal lives rather than work itself: things like grief, money, physical health, responsibilities, priorities, sleep and loved ones. It’s telling that the most commonly discussed issues on Spill, a message-based therapy app designed for workplaces, relate to romantic relationships — not work.
The remit of companies and HR managers has therefore been blown open: instead of just being responsible for employees’ wellbeing in the office, companies are now responsible for employees’ wellbeing full stop. It’s a huge change, and one that only the truly progressive companies are starting to embrace. Most are hoping in vain that quick and easy fixes will work on an incredibly complex human problem; water guns for a house fire. 74% of working adults in the UK were so stressed at some point last year that they felt like they “couldn’t cope”. Will free beers and a ping pong table really address this?
The top HR leaders aren’t thinking about how to help employees with work; they’re thinking about how to help them with life. The ‘Humans not Headcount’ series aims to give them the tools to do that.
