The Importance of Managing Work-Life Boundaries

Blurred boundaries can contribute to your well-being and the well-being of your organization and your family, but you must deal with trade-offs. On the positive side, the blurring of work-life boundaries makes life easier. Being constantly accessible can make a dramatic difference in the speed at which things get done. You no longer need to be face-to-face to connect and interact with colleagues or family members. It is a great boost to productivity to have information available from a mobile device. Being able to work outside an office creates tremendous freedom, cuts down on travel, and frees people to work when and where they choose. It also reduces unscheduled absences due to personal issues and may increase productivity.

On the negative side, these same boundary-blurring characteristics create the opportunity for us to interrupt one another at almost any time. As a result, many leaders are pulled in multiple directions and cannot focus on the situations they are in at the moment. Extensive interruptions can have profound implications, such as the following:

•  shallow, hurried decision-making processes

•  urgent, unimportant issues overshadowing important ones

•  decreased focus on rapidly changing circumstances

•  decreased coordination among team and unit members

•  increased errors and mistakes from rushing

•  psychological overload from increased cognitive complexity

People can become so busy responding to electronic devices and messages that they have little or no downtime at all, leading to increased stress and negative consequences for individuals and their organizations.

Individual Consequences

Many people worry that the constant blurring of boundaries allows work to intrude on their ability to raise a family or to have productive nonwork relationships. Healthy relationships require attention. In Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, author Sherry Turkle explains the risk that high levels of connectivity pose to social relationships. Blurred boundaries pose implications for health because of the stress associated with constant contact, which can contribute to health problems such as hypertension and hyperglycemia. Prolonged stress is also associated with impaired cognitive function and lowered energy levels. The way many busy people live challenges their capacity to remain resilient in the face of such stress. Time for rest, relaxation, and reflection is difficult to come by, but it is essential for building resilience.

Organizational Consequences

Some organizations don’t see stress and related issues as their concern. However, leaders are stewards of the organization, and they should be concerned about the negative effects of stress and related issues. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a federal agency dedicated to researching workplace health and safety issues, stress at work is associated with employee absenteeism and turnover. If employees don’t have time to concentrate and focus, how do you think that affects your organization’s performance? What effect do interruptions that break concentration have on collaboration, innovation, and sustainability in your organization?

Connectivity is inherently neither good nor bad, but it becomes a problem when individuals and organizations allow it to take over work-life boundaries in a way that limits the effectiveness of organizational members. It’s possible to create and navigate boundaries so that they nourish you rather than deplete you. Now it’s time to learn how.