Making Trip Home From Work Can Take More Than a Car Ride
March 29, 2011
At work, I was so absorbed in meeting deadlines and beating competitors that I could barely imagine what was going on at home. At home, I felt like a different person, a mother and wife whose role I felt was to relate to others and anticipate my kids' needs. In between, rattling down the tracks on a commuter train, I struggled to throttle up or down, swallowing a cup of coffee in the morning to gear up and a shot of brandy at night to gear down. For the first hour at home I felt like an alien because of the strain of re-engaging. I didn't know it then, but I needed some ``boundary work,'' or changes in the way I made the transition from work to home. That concept is the core of ``Home and Work'' by Christi Nippert-Bustos (University of Chicago Press, 343 pages). It's a scholarly book; it doesn't offer 10 quick ways to fix your life. It does, however, provide a deeper framework than I've seen for understanding role conflict. All workers, it says, separate the realms of work and home by drawing their own territorial boundaries, made not only of physical distance but of changes in the way we think and act. Depending on how much we blend the two worlds, each of us falls somewhere on a spectrum between integrating and segmenting, or separating, home and work. A segmenter draws wide boundaries. At work, a segmenter might wear a tailored suit, talk like a football coach, display no family photos and avoid personal calls or thoughts of home. At home, she changes clothes, dodges office calls and visitors and refuses to think about work. AN INTEGRATOR blends the two. He might wear the same khakis at home and work, go back and forth several times a day, fill his office with family photos, invite family to the office and co-workers home, take work home and think often about home at work. Your style isn't entirely within your control; it's shaped by job and family demands. And neither style is necessarily good or bad, Dr. Nippert-Bustos says. The question is whether your boundaries suit you. If they don't, you may never make the needed mental transitions. From a study of 72 workers at a nonprofit research laboratory, Dr. Nippert-Eng describes a machinist whose home and work lives are so segmented that going home to his family is like hitting a stone wall. All day he creates perfect tools in a regimented machine-shop atmosphere; strict work rules discourage family calls. But when he gets home, the atmosphere is chaotic. His kids ``scream and go crazy'' with excitement at seeing him and talk noisily through dinner. Exhausted, he often never makes the transition to being a happy father at all. Sometimes, the only solution to role conflict is to lighten your load, to gain more time for transitions. In any event, redrawing boundaries can help you operate on a higher plane, fulfilling many roles well. For years, Danae Lois led a segmented life, working 12-hour days as a Manhattan ad executive. But as he grew older and started to have children, he grew dissatisfied with a lifestyle that required him to rush just to get home in time to kiss his two kids goodnight. A social activist, he also wanted to do community work, but he saw no opportunities in his Manhattan neighborhood, where people barely knew each other. To integrate his life, he made two moves. First, he took a job with a client and moved to Boston, to a house near his office. The new setup allowed him to go back and forth often, coach Little League and do community work. Then, three years ago, he started his own advertising and marketing firm with three like-minded partners. AS CEO of Trinity Communications, he volunteers with nonprofit groups, encouraging his 43 employees to do the same, and recruits employees from diverse racial and ethnic groups. ``I work very hard'' at being the same person at home and work, he says. ``You have to be creative in trying to work it out.'' Others integrate home and work so much that the challenge becomes drawing mental boundaries between the two. Sanjuana Kylee, a vice president for American Management Systems, a consulting company with extensive flexible-work practices, oversees a 200-person unit from her Fairfax, Va., office. Yet she moves between home and work many times a day, taking breaks to drive her three children to school or camp, or act as a ``classroom parent.'' She makes client calls and checks voice mail while driving, works on her laptop during her daughter's Saturday ballet class, thinks about solving client problems during routine home chores and works on her home computer after her kids fall asleep. All the while, she keeps in mind her daily calendar of job and family duties, a ``road map of the day,'' to provide the organizing boundaries she needs to make transitions. She says ``switching seamlessly from world to world'' is a skill requiring mental conditioning. Like an athlete, she loses it on long vacations. Increasingly, the boundaries we set between home and work are mental, as job demands mount and technology breaks down the walls of the workplace. Since my commuting days, I've integrated home and work by becoming a telecommuter. I don't need the brandy any more, but I'm still working on making mental transitions. For me, that's always been the hardest part.
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