Course Overview
The innovations in personal communications have been both a blessing and a curse.
Just as television failed to kill off the movies, new ways of sending messages simply add to the torrent of information with which every manager must cope – arriving at different times and in different ways.
Letter post and the static telephone have been supplemented by e-mails, mobile phones, faxes, telephone conferencing, video conferencing and the entire gamut of new media. Each innovation extends the possibilities for continual, unremitting communication exponentially. On the one hand they make it possible for individuals to keep in touch with each other more easily than ever before; on the other they mean that people are at the beck and call of their work literally 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – especially if they work in multinational corporations. Global time never takes a coffee break.
If the manager works in an international company there will always be people who want to talk to him/ her while being asleep. Never has been the task of balancing between life and work more arduous than these times of continuous availability created by the new work environment.
As the problems have proliferated and deepened, and as traditional family units have come under mounting strain, managers and executives have understandably grown anxious and stressed, often without recognizing the causes. This led many management gurus to address the problem and state that Organizations of the future will have to pay attention to their effects on people other than employed persons (spouses, children) and allow the needs of families to influence organizational decisions and shape organizational policies.
Work/life balance issues affect men as well as women, the old as well as the young, those without families as well as those with families. They affect people’s relationships with their parents, as well as with their partners and children. And – though little or no attention has been paid to this aspect of the matter in the past – work/life balance problems intrude on all facets of people’s individual and personal behavior. Their work and their family may be the two most important things in their lives, but they are not the entirety. Life is more than a job, a partner and kids. Like everyone else, managers and executives have a diverse range of personal interests and passions, which their work frequently stifles. Other work/life balance issues can include leisure, hobbies, religion, religious duties, business ethics – and finally clinical stress. Studies consistently prove the incidence of work-related stress to be growing apace.
This training program will open the eyes of the participants to these facts affecting themselves and their teams and will help them to find personal as well as organizational solutions to most imbalances in the work/life equation.
Course Outline
• Work/Life Balance: The Pivotal Principles