Is Work/Life Balance a Trap?

What’s it like for two-earner households? What happens when both members of a marital unit are gainfully employed in full time jobs?

Either this represents a new stage of human evolution or it represents a mistake. Where past generations tended to grant women the greater part of household responsibility and men the challenge of succeeding in the world of work, the millennial generation, having been cured of the notion that men and women are different, is choosing to live out this piece of the feminist dream.

Their managers are not happy.

According to the Washington Post an Ernst & Young survey found that those who manage millennial employees are frustrated by their half-hearted commitment to work.

The Post explains the cultural disparity:

Close to 80 percent of millennials surveyed are part of dual-
income couples in which both work full time. Of Generation X workers, people in their 30s and 40s now, 73 percent are. But of baby boomers, the generation born just after World War II that now occupies most top management positions, just 47 percent have a full-time working spouse. More than a quarter of baby-boomer workers have a spouse at home, or one who works part time or with flexible hours and is responsible for taking care of all home-front duties.

They call it work-life balance, but others see it as a path to drudgery. Millennials do not want to work too hard because they want to have more time with their families and even more time to have fun.

This means that are not very ambitious and do not wish to rise up the corporate hierarchy. In the long run they will be losing out to those who have more ambition and who work harder.

The Post writes:

Younger workers see that technology frees them to work productively from anywhere, she said. But older bosses who are more accustomed to work cultures with more face time may see only empty cubicles. “They’re afraid people who don’t come to the office won’t work as hard,” she said.

Millennial workers, the group that companies say they are scrambling to attract and retain, are the most dissatisfied. Survey after survey, including the EY one, show that what millennials most want is flexibility in where, when and how they work. Millennials as well as men were most likely in the survey to say that they would take a pay cut, forgo a promotion or be willing to move to manage work-life demands better.

If you can work productively anywhere in the world, your employer is going to figure out that someone in India or Ireland can do your job just as well while costing significantly less.

The millennial passion for work/life balance will probably accelerate the movement toward outsourcing. Recall that the Washington Post also reported that American millennials are lagging in most measures of workplaceproficiency. If they are also lagging in motivation, their future does not look very bright.

Before we lay this problem on baby boomers and other antiquated relics, we must note that Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer banned telecommuting at her company.

When Mayer took over at Yahoo! she saw that empty workstations demoralized people. She saw that people who sat at home in front of their screens did not work effectively as a team. And she noted that it was more difficult to manage people when the people were not present.

Surely, some jobs can be outsourced. But, when you are working from home you are not on the path to higher management. You will not be forming the alliances with other people that are essential to executive leadership.

Management positions require personal interaction, schmoozing at the water cooler and brainstorming meetings. There is no effective substitute for face-to-face human contact.

Sad to say, millennials do not value dedication and loyalty to their companies. Beyond the fact that they are excessively self-involved, they are sacrificing their lives for an ideology.

The report concludes:

And nearly 40 percent of young workers, male or female, in the United States are so unhappy with the lack of paid parental-leave policies that they say they would be willing to move to another country.

The research is skewed toward the notion that companies need to adapt in order to keep their best employees. If you like positive spin, this is it.

The higher truth suggests that companies will adapt by moving more work to areas of the world where people actually want to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

The highest truth suggests that this is yet another way for separating the wheat from the chaff. Many young people are consigning themselves to workplace mediocrity. The notion that they should work hard in order to excel does not seem to have crossed their addled minds.

Why are they doing this?

Consider the case of Ryan Shaw, dutifully reported by the Post:

Ryan Shaw, 23, is a case in point. He doesn’t have children, yet he rates work-life balance as not only important but also “necessary for success.”

Shaw does social media marketing for a start-up in Los Angeles called Forcefield. He liked his job. But he didn’t like living in L.A., where his expensive rent kept him from being able to pay down his astronomical student loans. He had other job offers that would have given him more money but demanded more work hours.

He had a different idea. He told his boss that he would stay at the company, but only if he could do his job from his laptop, wherever and whenever he wanted. His boss agreed.

So Shaw is moving back home to Florida.

“The narrative that’s always drawn is you have to choose financial success or personal success [and] having a life. And to me, that’s a false choice,” Shaw said. “I think you can have both. I’m sort of playing the long game. I want to take care of my health and have deep relationships with people I care most about. And not just people who happen to be in the same building with me every day.”

Shaw thinks that you can have both, that you can do your job and have fun in the sun. He does not understand that cultivating deep relationships with other people, at the expense of your job, will open the possibilities for more dedicated people to advance.

In the end, Shaw comes across as a whiner.