The term work-life balance didn’t come into popular use until 1986. While still in use, it no longer fits today’s circumstances. But before we redefine it, we first need to examine the evolution of work and working.
Following World War II, soldiers came home to a “revitalized” United States. For the next 30 years, the United States enjoyed economic expansion. This period was named the Great Compression: economic expansion coupled with social welfare initiatives, and strong, healthy unions flattened wage differentials, pulling everyone towards the middle.
When a young person entered the workplace, they became a “Company Man,” whose career culminated in a pension after many years of service. It was an unwritten covenant between employer and employee.
You were unlikely to broach the notion of work-life balance. It would have been seen as an indication you were not serious about your job and not committed to the organization.
Gen X and the beginning of the transactional workplace
Things started to change in the mid 70s. It was the beginning of the end of the covenant. As children, Gen Xers witnessed the downsizing and euphemistic “right-sizing” that their parents endured.
Many took the lesson to heart and, as adults, knew that they couldn’t rely on a single company to take care of them. Rather than selling their skills to legacy companies, they used their expertise to establish their own companies, which gave birth to the dot-com boom.
The dot-com workplaces were typically less formal, more egalitarian, and experimental in nature. Clever young people worked out new ways to leverage technology to reimagine how work–and the workplace–should look. Demands for more work-life balance that workers had not been able to make under the covenant were first implemented by Gen X entrepreneurs.
Millennials move the needle
Gen Xers recognized the difficulty in balancing work with a personal life, while still expecting to succeed professionally. Work still had to come first. The best they could hope to do was build a workplace that had enough flexibility to allow for shifting priorities and needs in one’s personal life.
The Millennial mindset is different. It can be described as work-life integration. This, too, should not be mistaken for balance. Millennials are not doing a better job of balancing their personal lives with work than Gen Xers have. Rather, they have worked to integrate work into their personal lives, breaking…
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