Work-Life balance- Looking through a multi-specialty view (economist, Sociologist and Maybe philanthropist…)

Work-life balance is often the most pronounced topic especially in the IT world…..I was just reading Paul Krugmans book on economics on production frontiers and would construct a very simple model of work in one axis and Life in other axis…to me the graph may have a very interesting bell shaped curve….(depending of course on which axes you put work and life…J….)

 

Let’s look at the graph to really understand this model….

 

 

If one has to view it very simply…there is an optimal balance of work required for a decent life…in effect no works leads to no life and in the same context increased work leads to decreasing life (due to stress, loss of health, poor quality)…again this curve in general applies to a normal productive resource…I mean normal for those who has a balanced life (life is not all about work; but also about spending time with the family)…the above graph itself  demonstrates that the perception of balance is often subjective….

 

The graph above does not differentiate race, color, region, sex, status and so on…it generally applies to all…though the social norms may vary and promote diversity in perception of what a balanced resource means….

 

Going now by the same logic does it mean then that during difficult times increasing work-hours or putting in more productive hours benefit the organization or economy as a whole…This is a very interesting topic to discuss…what the increase in productive hours seems to do is basically shift the kurtosis of the above bell shaped curve…lets look at this in context of what increased working hour does to the above graph as represented in Fig 2….

This has basically reduced the quality of life for a productive resource…but did it commensurately increase the productive hour of a resource…this may be debatable as one needs to understand what is productive hour of resource…especially if resource contributions are not measured or directly account to achieving or not achieving an outcome…Achieving or not achieving a outcome is usually better achieved through the means of shifting accountability to resources rather than just increasing the productive hours….Again, there is another interesting debate on whether working longer leads to passing on productivity benefits to client…not really so it seems especially for new deals as the new deals will drive towards charging more to client per hour in a day by ~11%...however the old deals contracted for 8 hours a day may stand to benefit due to increased hours of working? Not to sure again it shifts back to what resources really do in that 1 additional hour of work contributing to the outcome….. This is an interesting topic….my hypothesis is just increasing the productive hours may be a bad decision in long run ceteris paribus….What do you think?