Work/life balance blurred for directors
May 13 2011
Work/life balance is blurred for many bosses
Managers’ readiness to switch between work and leisure activities during their time off is creating a ‘grey area’ between their personal and professional lives, research finds.
Company directors spend an average of 2.5 hours a week on top of their usual working week researching, reading or learning for work in their own time, according to a study of 2,000 respondents by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), suggesting a work/life balance that is blurred for directors.
Career development activities, industry monitoring and work-related learning were found to take place frequently and voluntarily outside of core working hours and locations, largely enabled by mobile technology.
Of the 76 per cent of managers who can use devices including smartphones, laptops or tablets to work, almost half (49 per cent) check their emails just before going to sleep at night and a quarter (24 per cent) check them again on waking before they get out of bed in the morning.
Additionally, 26 per cent of managers check emails on their way to and from work and even social occasions are not email-free – 22 per cent of managers monitor emails when they are socialising with friends and 9 per cent even when out on dates.
Out of office hours, 59 per cent of managers choose to visit websites related to their profession, 32 per cent read magazines and journals about work, and 30 per cent read work-related books.
CMI chief executive Ruth Spellman says that managers voluntarily indulging in certain work-related activities before and after work doesn’t mean they are actually doing their day-to-day job outside of office hours, but just keeping up to date with news on the industry sector they work in.
She says, ‘This creates a bit of a grey area in the work-life balance debate. It’s very important that people keep an eye on how much of their free time they spend dipping into the world of work – maintaining a good work-life balance is vital.'
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