Sharpening the Saw: Does Your Corporate Culture Foster Work/Life Balance?

Lighthouse’s President and CEO, Jeff Van Fleet, provides his thoughts on a key aspect of corporate culture: the necessity of work/life balance.

Sharpening the Saw: Does Your Corporate Culture Foster Work/Life Balance?

Photo courtesy of kylesteed (Creative Commons)

A corporate culture can encourage work/life balance.
It shows your team that you value them as people, not just cogs in the corporate wheel. 

This past week was fantastic.  We held an Atlanta Launch event at an Atlanta Hawks game to celebrate opening our new office.  We celebrated with current and prospective clients, enjoyed some good food and drink, a good basketball game, and, most importantly, had the opportunity to get to know one another.  It’s this personal connection that I like best — I like knowing what’s going on in people’s lives.  Work is important, but it’s just one aspect of who we are.

As I met several new people this trip, a common theme seemed to emerge from our conversations: company culture and wanting a better work life balance.  Balance is something that I have been playing with for many years.  I visualize it like a multi-seated teeter-totter with work, children, wife, spirituality, etc. on all the different seats.  For a long time, my idea of balance was trying to keep all of these things perfectly level.  As you might imagine, that was very stressful and virtually impossible.  Now, I still visualize that same teeter-totter, but I let it move with my life.  It rolls up and down like the waves in the ocean, and my job is to “allow” it to flow.  Sometimes, we have a big deadline at work and that seat gets more attention, and other times I have pressing family matters that I want to attend to.  As long as none of the seats get “pegged” for too long, I feel like I am doing pretty well. 

A corporate culture can encourage work/life balance.  It shows your team that you value them as people, not just cogs in the corporate wheel.  Balance is one aspect of our culture here at Lighthouse, but there are other key aspects as well — maybe I’ll talk about them in upcoming blogs. 

Remember, it takes time and energy to create what you want.  Whether you lead a company, department, team, family, or just yourself, you get to choose how you do so.  Why not begin now, and be intentional in creating your culture?  I’d love to hear from you about the kinds of culture you like and what you are doing (or would like to do) to create it.  I’ll do my best to help you.

Keep having fun,

Jeff Van Fleet
President and CEO
Lighthouse Technologies, Inc
Software Testing | Quality Assurance Consulting | Oracle EBS Consulting

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