Work-Life Balance: Walking the Talk

601am’s First Report Card on Work-Life Balance

I read “How to Stealthily Tell If a Company Cares About Work-Life Balance” with great interest due to its timing. 601am just had our first baby — by which I mean one of my developers gave birth to the first baby born to an employee — and my mind was focused on whether 601am could do better at serving our developer in her new role as a mom.

I care deeply about making 601am a great place for my entire team, including those with kids, because I work here, too.

We try to balance work and life. We say we are a company that values balance. But so do a ton of companies.

Are we actually walking the talk?

So I ran the numbers. As an agency, we carefully track our time to make sure we’re correctly billing our clients. Here are 2016 Q1 weekly totals for the full-time employees:

I’ve highlighted weeks for those employees who worked between 40–45 hours (in light orange) and between 45–50 (in red).

I excluded myself from this chart because I frequently work more than 40 hours a week on various businesses (sometimes directly related to 601am, sometimes not). I also removed our contractors who act like full-time employees but get paid hourly (they didn’t work more than 40 hours a week in Q1).

No one worked over 48.75 hours in Q1. While I’m proud of these numbers, I hate that we have even 3 red cells. We could still do better.

These numbers are just one indication of 601am’s ability to walk the work-life balance. Other factors are harder to quantify: the flexibility we grant our employees (work from home, work non-traditional hours), generous paid-time off, stress within a 40 hour work-week.

Going forward, I’d like to open this anonymized data up on a real-time basis so future hires can judge for themselves if 601am fits their ideal of a company that truly walks the work-life balance.

Since this is the first time we’ve released this data, I’d be interested in hearing what you think. Is this type of data useful? Should more companies do it?

601am is a digital agency working with publishers, media companies and brands that act like publishers, providing user experience design, development, marketing and support. Learn more about us at 601am.com or contact us to talk.