In August, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called parental stress an urgent public health issue. In his advisory, Murthy called for a cultural shift in order to better support the children’s primary caregivers as stressors unique to parenting can have a large impact on the day.
“The stresses parents and caregivers have today are being passed to children in direct and indirect ways, impacting families and communities across America,” Murthy wrote in his advisory. “Yet in modern society, parenting is often portrayed as a less important, less valued pursuit. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
While it’s something that most people strive to achieve, having a healthy work/life balance is easier said than done, especially when you work for an industry like facilities management. The phone could ring at any time of the day with an emergency that you must attend to. This can create a burden on families with young children, leaving a lot of household responsibilities to fall on the other parent or caregiver.
A female facility manager, in particular, may have a harder time balancing familial responsibilities on top of the unpredictability of workplace emergencies. The need to be “on-call” can place an immense amount of “mom guilt” on a working mother as they leave their children and disrupt their routines. Some women have been able to navigate this challenge by delegating tasks, strategic planning and empowering team members to be decision makers.
“I spend time one on one with team members to ensure that they can handle and use decentralized command when I am at other sites to handle the task,” says Maria Ruiz, Facilities & Operations Manager, Unicef USA. “As a working mother and caretaker, I know how important it is to ensure that my personal and professional responsibilities coexist harmoniously. I am a firm believer that a women can have a vocation and, or career and take care of her family with the right boundaries, organizational support and resilience to be empowered enough to ask and assert what she needs to do a job well done in both arenas.”
In a post-pandemic world, more and more people are choosing their jobs based on their flexibility. Workplace culture plays a large role in how employees can balance their home life with their work. Now more than ever, organizations should strive to support their employees and create an environment that values personal commitments and work/life balance. When a company offers remote work, flexible schedules, family leave or just a general understanding that employees can be trusted to work, the more likely that employees will stick around for the long term.
“There are some organizations that take great pride and make great strides to support a work /life balance,” says Alana Dunoff, strategic facility planner, instructor and executive at AFD Professional Services. “Work/life balance is woven into their culture and how they conduct business on a daily basis. These companies tend to have corporate mission and value statements that emphasize the value of their people in making the company successful. Their philosophy is happy people who feel taken care of by their companies, are productive people who feel a sense of belonging and connection.”
Still, more rigid working environments can make finding that much-needed balance difficult. Setting boundaries can help limit the amount of time that work spills into home life, but that in itself is a skill when we are now more connected to our phones than ever before. Dunoff suggests using the “scheduled send” feature in emails so that recipients won’t feel obligated to respond when it is after work hours. In addition, adding an out-of-office auto-reply in the evenings is another way to train people to not expect a response after a certain time of day.
Boundaries can also help ensure that a single person isn’t trivial to the entire operation. Employees need to be able to work smarter so that they don’t lose sight of the important work that is front and center within the facilities management industry. Using technology like automated systems to help manage work orders can help streamline and reduce unnecessary off-hours work.
“We are all a bit too addicted to our technology, there are so many high expectations of immediate responses from messages we receive,” says Dunoff. “To minimize the impact on your family, you have to decide that other things are more important than emails. The emails truly can wait. We can choose to not let easy access to technology lure us into working more than is necessary.”
Work/life balance is a journey, though, not a destination. It’s something that needs to be reviewed and adjusted on a regular basis. It is very possible to have a career in an industry as demanding as facilities management, while still being able to be true to yourself in your personal life. Nobody can do it all on their own. Asking for help, seeking out mentors and simply being honest with yourself can help set priorities and relieve any type of burden.
“I truly believe and support the need for those in positions, like myself, to influence work/life policies at work to always stand up, support, advocate and support women in the workplace and especially in facilities where we are now starting to see more women in the field,” Ruiz says. “Women should not fear being part of this dynamic and rewarding career instead other women and other facilities leaders should stand strong in supporting them. This in turn creates a stronger, more eager, female workforce, to participate and be productive and successful in the facilities industry – and we need that. We need more women to participate and contribute to this amazing and challenging profession.”
Mackenna Moralez is the associate editor of the facilities market.
