Are You Doing The Work-Life Balancing Act ?

Is your work-life balance in sync with your idea of it? As the lines blur between work and other aspects of your life, Neeti Jaychander helps you step back and reconsider

- Neeti Jaychander

We've all heard the term ‘work-life balance’. Especially in urban India, the phrase is bandied about quite frequently. To the majority of people working in corporate and entrepreneurial India, a balance between the hours we spend at work versus the ones we spend on the rest of our life seems unrealistic, and frequently undoable. The implications of work-life imbalance, however, can be drastic. Explains Gajalakshmi Chandran, MD, Right Goal Pvt Ltd, “Over the years, the approach to worklife balance has been constantly evolving. Its definition varies significantly from baby boomers to generation X and millennials. Baby boomers craved stability in the workplace and valued the opportunity for employment above everything else. Because of this, work-life balance wasn’t a priority. As a result, 80 per cent of baby boomers report moderate to high levels of stress. As children of baby boomers, gen Xers were exposed to the effect that long work hours had on personal life and therefore, gen Xers started to view work-life balance as a necessary prerequisite to a happy personal life. Work was not the sole objective of a happy life but a means through which they could enrich the lives of their family. With millennials, work ethic is thought to be secondary, or just a part of life. The 2017 Workplace Benefits Report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch found that 59 per cent of millennials report feeling worried about finding a career path that will support the lifestyle they’ve envisioned for themselves, a paradigm shift from the previous two generations.”

WHY IS WORK-LIFE BALANCE SKEWED IN INDIA TODAY?