FEBRUARY 24 — In the reality of our corporate situation today, the truth is that certain job and career choices are sometimes simply incompatible with having and spending meaningful time with your family and friends.

Having an active assurance of work-life balance is vital towards encroaching on a truly rich socio-economic environment. We shouldn’t be spending our lives in the office nor should we be too fixed in the comfort zone of our family. 

Commercial companies today are essentially geared to use employees and workers to the fullest of their capability. No matter how well intentioned the company may be, the interest of the company — which is to reap maximum revenue — lies in contrast to our intention of having fun with friends or relaxing with family. 

Despite this however, I am confident because work-life balance, no matter what people contend, is essentially and truly a decision that we can fully control. Although certain government decisions have helped, there’s no need to wait for a government policy to finally start seeing your kids and wife more. In the end, you can make that final decision. 

Categorically, we must shuffle the cards of our life within the factors of an intellectual side, an emotional side, an active side and the spiritual side. 

Of course, the intellectual side encompasses our work. It is the platform within which our ideas get challenged. It is the arena where we learn new skills and confront new obstacles. 

On the emotional side resides our family: those heartfelt moments when our child comes home with an A+ or that time you teach your son how to ride his first bike. 

To tackle all these aspects of life in a day can be highly demanding. But I believe it is possible by investing little by little, day by day more into these four different aspects of our life. If your goal is to read more before you sleep, start by reading a page tonight, then improve from there. If your plan is to write more often, start writing a paragraph tomorrow morning, then work your way up. If the change is too drastic, you end up losing momentum and right back where you started.

Having employers and workers that can manage and obtain a work life balance is, in the end, a crucial revenue growth for companies. 

If we look at the companies that have made the customer service “Hall of Fame,” — companies such as Trader Joe’s, UPS, Apple — one thing we should take note of is their investment in employee happiness year after year. 

Investment in this context does not just mean monetarily too. It can simply mean managers investing their time asking their employees what they value and their opinions. The first step to making your employees happy at work is to make sure that their opinions are being heard. 

Investing in employee happiness has proven to result in happy customers. And happy customers are an easy transition to high revenue. 

Yoshie Komuro, an expert in work-life balance in Tokyo argues that the best way to improve productivity is to give your workers a break.

What’s happening is that when employees stay beyond 5pm, and when they go home at 11pm, the work they do in that late evening is not only damaging but detrimental for the creativity of the company. 

Our brain can only concentrate for 13 hours after we wake up. After that, our work tends to make more mistakes and miscalculations. 

Companies under Komuro’s research have even found their revenue to increase when they scale back working hours by 30 per cent. This is a milestone of an idea, especially here in Malaysia, where we find that a majority of workers and employers believe that working longer hours implies greater hard work. 

The essential thing to remind ourself when trying to improve our work-life balance is that the middle path is the right formula. In this two sided spectrum, you can either do things too drastically too fast or you can end up delaying your life for when you retire—when all your friends can’t go out anymore and when your kids have gone on to build families of their own. 

If you take your kids out to play, don’t end up burying your face in your phones. Those crucial moments when your kids look back at you, to see if you’re having fun as well, you should be right there smiling back at them, not staring into your phones.

Quality time means being there for them, not just being there. 

In conclusion, by tackling work-life balance, we can lay the foundations to address a greater ideological problem: the idea that the richest person in the room is the most successful. I hope we can tackle this misconception and realign our comprehension on success to include the spiritual and emotional side of life. Only then can we look back at a life packed with prosperity, a truly fulfilling life. 

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.