WORK-LIFE BALANCE

In the recent years, modern companies have tried incorporating work and life in the same sentence; one may not be able to differentiate between work and life balance in most companies. In my understanding the two should clearly be distinct

Personally I have had different experiences on this. The first is when I interned at a certain company, the company working hours were between 8am and 5pm with exceptions of 7.30am during certain days of the week.
You would think 8am to 5pm was enough, right? Apparently, it was not. During my induction, the human resource commented that the working hours are between 8 to 5 am but she leaves at 12am the next day (In case you are wondering, no she is not getting paid for overtime). So when it reaches 5, and you want to leave, eyes start rolling your side. My second experience is when I was interning abroad at a startup they also did the same but unlike in my own country I had more bargaining power.

Statistics show that startups tend to push employees to work 16 hours a day, how insane is that. I can only have several explanations to this, one might be because their employees tend to take long breaks and therefore take more time to be productive for the day, two is that the work force is less and therefore one person has to do a lot of the bulky work.
These companies tend to compensate with a lot of activities to make the employees feel like they are valued and appreciated. But truth be told, you are as good as your next replacement. So far I have worked and now still work at another  company that respect work and life balance. You do not get to appreciate this, unless you have experienced both sides.

We should avoid being used by employers and maintain work life balance. Although, in the current competitive job market we don’t really have much of a choice. We work or we work. Right? Communicating about this to your supervisor/boss goes along way in your overall productivity.

I think work life balance is very important because without it, we tend to burnout, have concentration problems and health issues arise. I can’t emphasize enough on the importance of work life balance.

Authentically African!

Ps.I wrote this article some years back for African PA Magazine.