The fictional concept of work-life balance is crashing down around us right now. My friend Kelly Wilson has been arguing for ages that the idea that we have one personal life and one work life and somehow we need to bring them into some semblance of balance is arbitrary and not helpful; we are each one whole human being who works and who also has personal relationships and activities. For those of us who usually work in offices wearing professional attire and are now teleworking from home during the pandemic, that illusion of “distinct lives” that need to be brought into balance is no longer possible.
I feel extremely fortunate to be able to continue to work from home during the pandemic, and my household is generally self-sufficient while I work from the back bedroom with two cats who are very happy that I’m sitting still. But this pandemic event is like no other teleworking situation we’ve ever experienced. With schools and daycare centers closed for the foreseeable future, millions of parents are faced with the experience of still being expected to work a full time job WHILE caring for their families — not broken up into different periods during the day, but at the exact same time.
In some work settings, I know that family members don’t even come up in conversation, and it’s generally taboo and unprofessional to have your children making noise in the background of a conference call. Because of that whole work life vs. personal life thing. We generally have to pretend that the personal life doesn’t exist during the workday, because we’re afraid that somehow will make us seem less professional. But we are all whole human beings, trying to figure out this new moment in time together. Everyone is in the same boat, and even the most hard-nosed bosses are having to acknowledge that if they want their employees to continue to work, there’s going to have to be more flexibility than usual.
This is affecting all of us who are now on extended telework status, and not just because our yoga pants are getting a lot more use during the workday than usual. When you’re working from your bedroom, how do you know when the end of the workday is? It can be even harder to transition out of work mode when you literally never leave your office, and your computer is across the room from you as soon as you open your eyes in the morning. And when your partner is home but is not teleworking, it can be hard for them to understand that just because you’re 10 feet away during the day doesn’t mean that you can just chat at any given moment.
But my experience so far is that this is the hardest for parents of toddlers and small children who can’t just entertain themselves during the day without focused adult attention. Here’s an email I got from my friend Caroline Rooney the other day:
Clarke just rang a literal cow bell while I was presenting to senior leaders on a conference call.
One of the senior leaders: “I think someone has an open mic.”
Caroline: “Apologies, that is coming from my office. Please refer to slide 4…”
How many millions of cowbell-type examples have been playing out every day for the past few weeks? This is not the embarrassing exception to professional life right now — this is the rule. This is professional life during the pandemic. We are being faced with this new reality of acknowledging that we have one life rather than the illusion of multiple separate lives. And it’s really stressful for lots of people right now. We’ve been taught to hide our personal lives during work, and people now feel that they can’t curate the necessary professional persona anymore.
What if those of us who are leaders and supervisors take this opportunity to create a more humane and compassionate work environment that doesn’t make our employees feel like they need to keep their personal selves artificially separated from their professional selves? What if we helped humanize ourselves in the process?
This week, I had a conference call with two of my super conscientious team members, who are also both mothers with two toddlers each at home right now. They asked for a meeting to let me know that they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to meet upcoming deliverable deadlines, and we were in the middle of brainstorming what other resources we needed to bring on board to support the team. I hope that I was demonstrating by my words and tone of voice that I cared about their situation, that I appreciated that they were being proactive about this, and that I would support them however I can.
Ironically, as we were in the middle of this conversation, my 17-year-old appeared at my bedroom door with a worried look on her face. She generally does her own thing when she can hear I’m on a conference call, but this moment was different. This time, she stuck her head around the corner and asked where our thermometer was. Any other time, I probably would have told her I’d come help her in 20 minutes when I was done with my phone call. But in the middle of a pandemic, when your teenager comes to you asking for a thermometer, there’s only one priority in that moment.
So, I told my team members that I needed to put them on hold for a few minutes, without apology or explanation. Fortunately, the temperature reading was perfectly normal, and we talked about how the symptoms sounded more like seasonal allergies and where the allergy medicine was. I got back on the call three minutes later and explained why I had to put them on hold. I have to hope that my modeling of how to prioritize what’s important on that call was even more reassuring than my platitudes a few minutes before about how I would do my best to support them in being both mothers and professionals at the same time.
As my friend Caroline (mother of the budding cowbell artist) said today, “It’s not everyday that you get the opportunity to be both a ‘bad’ employee and parent simultaneously.” But right now is that day. Right now is when we can be genuine and acknowledge our shared reality that we all only have one life, not multiple separate lives. I hope we can take the opportunity to humanize our workplaces for the better, both for now and long after this pandemic fades in our memories.
More cowbell.