When the line between work and home becomes blurred, this can create conflict and stress for some, but it also might allow for more flexibility for others. The immediate pivots and changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have encouraged us to evaluate how we work currently and how we want to work going forward. With more options for remote work, hybrid arrangements, and flexible scheduling than ever before, it’s important to know your own expectations regarding work and home, so you can create boundaries and advocate for the work style and preferences that work best for you.

liveWELL Interviewed Dr. Beth Livingston, Assistant Professor in Management and Entrepreneurship at the UI Tippie College of Business and an expert researcher on work and family management, for ways that individuals and leaders can explore their expectations, set boundaries, and communicate preferences related to work and home that lead to greater well-being and productivity.

 

 

Dr. Beth A. Livingston is an Assistant Professor in Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Florida, she spent eight years at Cornell University in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations before moving to the Midwest. She is passionate about studying gender, stereotyping, discrimination, and the management of work and family. Her research has been highlighted in the New York Times, NPR, and the Harvard Business Review, and it has been published in top academic journals. She has also done executive education, speaking engagements, and consulting for companies such as Accenture, John Deere, Yves Saint Laurent Beauty, and Allsteel.

 

liveWELL: We know that people often feel conflict between the demands of their work and their life outside of work. Too much conflict is a major contributor to burnout. Your research has focused on individual preferences for work and life integration– can you share a little bit about what you’ve learned?

Dr. Beth Livingston: Work and life outside of work are domains that have different role responsibilities and expectations, and sometimes these responsibilities and expectations can interact with each other. Conflict can occur because work interferes with nonwork or because nonwork interferes with work, and both types of conflict can affect stress and burnout. It is particularly damaging when work conflicts with nonwork in a way that runs contrary to what you want. A friend and colleague, Dr. Ellen Kossek at Purdue, has created something called the WorkLife Indicator to address what people want their work and nonwork experiences to be including what domain you want to “protect” more (work or family), how much control you have over interruptions, and whether you want to keep those domains separate or blend them together. So, though no one likes interruptions, it’s worse when you’re trying to protect your family time, and work interferes anyways. It’s also worse when you prefer to keep work and family separate, but you have to answer emails and do meetings when you get home. Ultimately what people want is control over their boundaries and over the configuration that works best for them.

My work has focused a lot on how partners negotiate these preferred roles and boundaries at home and at work and how often this partner-partner interaction is overlooked in research that focuses on the workplace. I think one thing we can all agree on after the past two years is that everything in our lives is connected—and understanding how to help people manage their lives in the way that suits their preferences and needs best is good for well-being AND for productivity.

 

liveWELL:  Do you have any strategies for individuals who are trying to discover what their preferred work style is or on setting boundaries? 

 Dr. Beth Livingston: The WorkLife Indicator I mentioned before is available in “quiz” form, and I have found it to be immensely helpful when helping people to discover what they actually want their work and nonwork experience to be. Many times, organizations (and managers) impose their own desires on their employees. We are seeing it all the time now: “I hate to work from home, so surely you do too!” But research has demonstrated that when there is a mismatch between what people want and the policies that are available for them to use, the policies are not helpful. So, knowing yourself and what you want is a key component of creating policies that actually help people to live better, healthier lives.

Once you know what you want, advocating for that is more complicated, as it becomes a negotiation—with yourself, your coworkers, your partner, and your boss. My colleague, Michele Williams, is a negotiation expert, and I know she has a ton of tips on how to be successful when self-advocating, and I recommend her work. But in general, boundary management tactics can include using behavioral tactics to manage your boundaries (like using away messages, email filters, or hiring an assistant), temporal tactics (like removing yourself from time demands, using vacation days, or blocking out dedicated work time), physical tactics (building home office spaces to separate work from family), or communication tactics (setting expectations with managers or coworkers or communicating to people who email you on weekends that you do not want them to).

 

 liveWELL: What are ways that leaders and managers can support all types of employees with their work and life needs? 

 Dr. Beth Livingston: So, first determine what you want your boundaries to look like. Second—figure out how to configure them the way you want. But, obviously, the degree to which you can configure them the way you want is often dependent upon “border keepers” like your coworkers, clients, and managers. Too much research in the management of work and family have ignored the organizational context and focused on the individual, which can make things worse. After all, as research on the WorkLife Indicator suggests—control is the most important thing. And sometimes your manager is the biggest culprit in making you feel like you don’t have control over your work and family boundaries.

The first thing that leaders should realize is that every employee is different. Just because one method of managing work and life worked for you doesn’t mean that it will work for everyone. For example, I like to integrate my work and family domains—I do family stuff while “working” and work stuff at home. But I have had to recognize that the students I manage do not work best in the same ways. I ask them all how they like to work and how they like to communicate—and I take it upon myself to respect their boundaries since I’m the leader. At times I have to ask them to work outside of what I know they desire (deadlines sometimes make the decision for us), but I am always mindful of the consequences of that ask, and I help them to manage expectations and cope with those changes.

Second, try not to mistake management for monitoring. I made a video about this tendency at the beginning of the pandemic, and unfortunately, this tendency amongst many managers has not decreased. From my experience, this often comes from anxiety about leaders’ own abilities to lead well in uncertain situations. After all, many managers are under their own sources of stress. For example, our research with the university during the pandemic has shown that remote managers were over-stressed and overlooked. A grant I’m leading with the Healthier Workforce Center of the Midwest and my colleagues in Tippie will help us find ways to help these leaders to consider both productivity and well-being of their employees as they manage. But in the meantime, you can remember that these two things are co-related and place your employees’ well-being regarding managing work and family front and center as you help them to develop.

 

liveWELL: Can you share any personal well-being strategies that have helped you manage all of the demands of your personal and professional roles?

 Dr. Beth Livingston: One thing I’ve learned through studying work and family and teaching human resources is that there really is no one “best practice” for anything. So, I am careful to not prescribe what has worked for me for other people. With that caveat, I have found a few things helpful over my career.

1. I’m honest with myself as to what I really want. I have thought long and hard about how much my preferred work and family life is what I want versus what other people expect of me. This helps me to prioritize my boundaries. For example, when I had a leader who was always in the office during certain hours, I started to plan around what I felt were his expectations of me rather than what I wanted and how I worked best. This made me less happy and less productive. Now I’m honest with myself about how I want things to be. If I am in a situation where I feel that I must adhere to other’s expectations of me, I try not to pretend that it’s how I want to work, and I work toward my ideal configuration as often as I can.
2. I manage my own expectations. I also recognize that I can’t always get what I want, so I manage my own expectations. For example, when it comes toward the end of the semester and my classes require a lot of attention and my children are also excited about the holidays, and I have responsibilities on that front, I have to decide what I put on hold, so I don’t feel guilty about not achieving everything on my plate. I once had a mindfulness coach who told me not to “hit myself with a second dart”, meaning, let go of the guilt you have about things not going to plan because it’s an unnecessary negative feeling. The guilt doesn’t make things better, and it doesn’t change things. So, managing my own expectations is really helpful—and granting myself grace when I can’t do it all is really important to me.
3. I set goals and make plans. In a Clubhouse room last week, we talked about vision boarding and positive affirmations and how these things can help you to find the best version of yourself. I’ve never been a vision board person, but I appreciate how setting both general large goals (“I will be a leader”) and smaller specific goals (“I will get these papers graded by Tuesday”) are effective ways of helping to focus my attention. I make a lot of lists—but I have found that sometimes those lists serve to stress me out more. So, I am careful to both be honest with myself and to manage my own expectations while I’m planning. I grant myself the grace to not get something done or to change a timeline if something comes up. I also put personal and family tasks on the same list because I’m an integrator by nature, and it is helpful for me to think about these things together and not separately.

Overall, though—your mileage my vary. And the only “best practice” I can recommend is to get to know yourself and to communicate clearly with all the boundary keepers in your life. If you’re a leader, when you’re granting yourself grace, be sure to extend that grace to the people you manage. This has been a wild two years in so many ways, but during this time of great turmoil, we also have an opportunity to find a way to preserve people’s control over their work and nonwork lives and to balance both productivity and well-being.

Dr. Beth Livingston’s Recommended Resources on Creating Boundaries:

• Tippie Women Summit Series: Integrating Work and Life – What Does the Future Look Like for Work Life Management 
• Management Mistakes in a Time of COVID-19
• Setting Boundaries when Working from Home

Portions of this article originally appeared in the liveWELL 2022 Winter Employee Well-Being Newsletter.