Seldom has work-life balance been a more pressing topic, and the general perception is that taking our work home with us is bad for our family life. Alas, a recent Dutch study suggests it might not be quite as simple as that.
The research, which was undertaken by Utrecht University, suggests that working outside of normal office hours doesn’t necessarily hurt family life. Indeed, doing so can actually give parents more opportunities to care for children.
The work suggests that if we didn’t take work home with us, we would instead turn to childcare, and so therefore by taking our work home, we’re actually creating more opportunities to be with our kids, albeit in a way that does raise questions about the quality of the engagement.
Suffice to say, the paper doesn’t dismiss the value of childcare, and does conclude that when families make use of it, fathers tend to have higher levels of wellbeing when working outside traditional office hours.
“Incidentally, the role of childcare is not the same in all countries. I compared Dutch families with families in Finland and Great Britain. Dutch parents who work outside office hours tend to make less use of formal childcare than Finnish parents,” the author says.
Detaching from work
The work forms part of a much wider canon of research into work-life balance. For instance, a study from a few years ago found that thinking about work at home can be key to better work-life balance.
The study asked participants a range of questions about their various goals at work. When the data was analyzed, it emerged that people generally had difficulty switching off when tasks were left incomplete. This was particularly the case when those tasks were important to them.
To try and mitigate this, a section of participants were asked to create a plan for how they could go about completing these various unfinished tasks. They were then tested again to see if their ability to detach had changed compared to peers who made no such plans.
“If you have an important deadline looming on the horizon, for example, your brain will keep nudging you with reminders, which makes it difficult to get a break from work demands. It seems like we have the ability to ‘turn off’, or at least ‘turn down’, these cognitive processes by planning out where, when, and how goals will be accomplished,” the author says.
“This is primarily true for people that already have a difficult time forgetting about work during leisure because their job plays a central role in their life. For them, a simple change to their work routine like task planning near the end of the workday would likely make a real difference,” he concludes.
Both studies do underline the difficulties inherent when we establish conventions and norms about work-life balance that may not actually be true, or helpful.
