Does successfully juggling family life make you better at work?
In this hybrid working world, the boundaries between the office and home often overlap. Employees must balance flexibility and productivity, all while adapting to changing personal and professional settings. What if this so-called strategic renewal – how you adapt and adjust to change at home – is the key to being a better employee? A research team led by the University of Bath in the United Kingdom (UK) reveals that effectively dealing with all the chaos at home improves performance at work. The findings were published in the ‘Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology’(opens in new window).
Home away from home
To examine how home life affects work performance, researchers carried out a 6-week online survey involving nearly 150 full-time, dual-income couples with children. They were evenly split by gender and worked in a broad range of industries in the United States. The volunteers were given 3 hours to complete the questionnaire at the end of each week. This was done to ensure that responses clearly reflected events and experiences near the end of a given work and home week. Items concerned the extent to which the participants engaged in strategic renewal at both home and work, ‘flow’ at home (ideal state of engagement) and self-efficacy (confidence in coping with challenges). The results showed that reorganising family responsibilities, such as adjusting childcare schedules, contributes significantly to determining how resilient, creative and innovative people are at work. “Sometimes family life can feel like survival mode,” stated lead author Yasin Rofcanin, professor of organisational psychology and human resource management at the University of Bath, in a press release(opens in new window). “But when people proactively and deliberately make changes – whether to childcare routines, to care of older relatives, or how domestic tasks are shared - they feel more capable and in control. That confidence can carry over into their work, helping them become more creative and adaptable.” Co-author Siqi Wang from Aston Business School in the UK added: “Couples might hold regular ‘household check-ins’ to reassign chores, revisit priorities, or coordinate weekly plans. These kinds of deliberate, future-oriented adjustments enable families to respond flexibly to changing demands to build confidence, reduce stress, and enhance overall functioning at home and at work.”
Taking the home to work with you
Rofcanin explained that there’s a lesson here for employers, too. “As hybrid and flexible work models become the norm, the boundaries between home and work continue to blur. It’s important that employers recognise how home dynamics influence workplace performance. Supporting employees both at work and home can lead to a more engaged and innovative workforce.” Businesses need to support their workforce in nurturing personal resources beyond work through wellness programmes and access to counselling services and family care support. Investing in leadership development programmes will provide managers with the skills needed to respond compassionately to employees’ work and family responsibilities. So next time you’re trying to juggle homework, meals, extracurricular activities and parent-teacher association meetings, think of how it could positively affect the way you think, feel and operate in the workplace.