Globalization And Work-Life Balance
Globalization And Work-Life Balance
"While all aspects of our life are important, without a balance you become addicted and like all addictions you lose". ~ Catherine Pulsifer.
Working for a global company can create havoc on any attempt to balance work and family. Many executives think and talk a lot about the time we spend away from our families both because we are flying around the world and because we work as long as it is office hours somewhere.
One of our senior executives in India recently told me he misses family time almost every evening because of long conference calls from the US. Another exec whose family is in the UK spends too much time flying back and forth between the US, UK and India; he's not doing justice to either job or family. So he's reluctantly decided to stay put in India for the next three weeks away from family to bring some order back to his life.
In my own case, living in Chennai and working out of Mumbai, I have been in the same city for more than a week only twice over the last 18 months. Before that, while living in the US, my calls to India would start at 7 o'clock in the morning (during my daily walk) and go on till around 10 o'clock. Then I'd make calls to the UK for several hours. I would reach office after lunch and then put in a full day working late to handle the US business.
In the early days of world trade, goods would be produced in the local countries, at earthly hours, and would be transported by ship to faraway destinations. Globalization today is more taxing. Businesses are more complex. As the services component of global trade increases, so does the need for more communication and interaction.
Moreover, as sales, production and delivery become more team-based and knowledge-based, more people are needed to interact and play to the same sheet of music. The global businesses of today require more people interacting for more time across more countries.
Cell phones, Blackberrys and email, with their ability to keep us connected across time zones 24/7, add to the mix. Before takeoff on a recent flight in Mumbai, a person behind me was on the phone with an American colleague trying to diagnose a problem after a server went down.
Before switching off the phone, he spoke to yet another colleague, probably in India, to check out possible fixes. The instant the flight landed a couple of hours later, he was back on the phone working through the fixes. As I disembarked, the conversation was still going on, leaving me curious whether he solved the problem or not.
We need to recalibrate our time and travel. Cost and ecological considerations are encouraging companies like ours to reduce travel and adopt video-conferencing instead. In addition, companies are recognizing they need to set boundaries around working hours, personal time and holidays.
We need to encourage corporate cultures that separate work and home, and hold family time sacrosanct. We also need to be "modularize" work so that local teams, working in close physical proximity, take on specific projects and tasks in "packages" that make geographic sense. Interface standards, across work packages, will minimize the need for extensive communication and interaction.
As a world, we are still learning how to deal with globalization at an individual and family level. We need to strike the right balance, in terms of distribution of work and output, between globalization and localization. Do share your own experiences and perspectives with regards to globalization and family life.
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