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Chris Chapman was interviewed recently by Peter Taylor Whiffen for ICAEW’s Business and Management magazine. The article explored work-life boundaries and how to ensure they stay separate. Here is an extract…
Work mode
There was a time when you could walk out of your office and that would be the end of your working day. But now, that does not seem to be the case. Our craving to be connected and the rise of the 24-hour society means thousands spend hours of leisure time on phones and tablets, checking work emails, browsing through our firm’s social media, answering texts from the boss, researching and sending the reply to a query, finishing off that report.
With your work in your home – or at least always on your phone in your pocket – the line between work and life is becoming increasingly blurred. “Smart devices, the cloud, email and social media all make it so tempting to slip into work mode, especially if colleagues are sending you messages ‘out-of-hours’,” says Chris Chapman, founder of Numitas. Chapman co-founded the Cambridge based finance consultancy to focus on portfolio work – with the aim of improving his own work-life balance. “I found I was spending my whole life in front of a laptop, when I should have been watching my lad play football on a Saturday,” he says. “I needed to change.”
He’s also encouraging his peers to follow suit. Numitas’s CFO Club boasts 5,000 finance professionals who, he says, are especially vulnerable to blurring work-life lines: “Particularly if you’re in a more operational role, where almost all of your work is done on a screen, that potential for work to spill over into your life is more present now than it’s ever been.”
Productive commuting
“I was aware on the train into work this morning that everyone around me was on a laptop, tablet or a phone,” says Chapman. “I imagine that most of them were working, and I certainly use that time to catch up on admin or write emails. It’s become a valuable part of my wrapping up of the working day, but only so I can then hopefully switch off completely when I get home, without feeling I need to do anything.” So has the commute become an extension of the working day? Many see it as a sort of buffer in the morning and evening between home and work, a kind of hinterland where you’re sort of doing your job, but not having to follow all the rules and mores of working life. Not only do thousands use it as such, but many of them, like Chapman, actively welcome it.
Legal implications
There are financial and legal implications to productive commuting though.
“If you have your laptop out on the train, there are sensitivities about the material you’re working with, in terms of privacy, confidentiality, data protection.” But how much legal responsibility – to employers, clients and the public – lies with the employee for protecting this information, even if they are not technically at work? And how much with their employer, who might be insisting work is done on the commute?
Respecting boundaries
An employee should have the right to keep their home life sacrosanct, says Chapman. “You should be able to manage the company’s expectations about your out-of-hours availability,” he adds. “There will be some companies with managing directors where it will be difficult, but there will be places where you can set your stall out – especially if you are new in a job. It doesn’t have to be a big issue – either clarify during an interview or, on the evening of your first day, ignore those work emails and apologise the next day if they were expecting a response but clarify you were doing things with your family and you don’t respond to emails in the evening. You might even change the culture of the organisation – or help to come up with a solution that protects people’s rights to choose whether or not to work outside office hours.”
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