Time to get started and a reflection on Work Life Balance

Wow! I have really picked the ultimate blog week. My days are mostly hectic. Right now they are very very hectic. A lot of things are happening since we are in the middle of a re-organization. But I will tell you more about that in a later post :-)

I started working for my manager, our SVP Quality & Customer Satisfaction, in April 2012. GTT, as we internally shorten Group Trucks Technology, is part of the Volvo Group. The whole Volvo Group has 100 000 employees in 19 countries and production in more than 190 countries. My manager is responsible for the quality in our products on the markets as well as to assure quality & safety in our future products. Our quality organization has around 400 employees and are found in India, Japan, US, France & Sweden.

I often think about how lucky I am that went on that interview a bit more than three years ago. I was convinced I should continue in the HR field. But after trying out the life as Executive Assistant I realized all my qualities were finally used in the right way. I think for a whole lot of us assistants, our profession is something we discover by coincidence. And once we discover it we realize the benefits. I often feel I need to clarify for others how interesting my job is. But it is not only interesting and very varied, it can from time to time also be extremely demanding.

This leads us to a topic dear to my manager and to our Q&CS organization. I am speaking about the so called Work Life Balance! Having a satisfying work-life-balance is something many people struggle with. We started to address the topic about 1 1/2 year ago in our management team. Our yearly VGAS (Volvo Group Attitude Survey) showed that many employees were lacking balance between work & private life. Our Q&CS management team decided it was crucial to start working with this actively which is something we have done ever since. For me this has meant a lot of learnings as I have been coordinating many different initiatives.

At the same time as we took the decision in the management team to actively address those issues Alviva (health care) was looking for a pilot for a "psychosocial screening". The psychosocial health scan is included in the obligatory environmental rounds but does not easily get discovered through that method. The psychosocial screening is instead done with a survey sent to each employee by mail. It is handled by an external source which makes it 100% anonymous. Our Swedish part of the Q&CS got to do the survey and we then spent coming six months working very actively with the results in the different management teams. We are now in the middle of a follow up and the results are to be sent to us any day. Our managers are trained in how to understand and work with the outcome in their groups, something that is vital in order to be able to follow up in a meaningful way.

Apart from this we had, and have still, many other activities around the theme worklife balance on the agenda. One of the more popular once was a global chat around this topic. Considering we are spread out around the globe, handling different timezones is something to always keep in mind. For the worklife balance chat two invitations were made to the full organization, one early and one late (seen from my manager´s calendar...)

The chat tool we used was anonymous to allow for people to ask any questions they wanted. "Behind the scenes" we had a room with my manager in it, supported by Communications, HR and one Psychologist. Plus one extra chat moderator, a role that I also have had the pleasure to try during other chat sessions :-) All kinds of questions were asked. The chat moderator divided the questions between the persons in the room and portioned out the answers in a nice flow. I especially remember my managers answer to one of the questions which was something like "How do you define worklife balance?" My manager´s answer was "Worklife balance is when you are comfortable with the time and effort you invest in your work, compared with the time and effort you invest in your personal life".

Work life balance is a personal thing. What suits one person might be stressful for another and vice versa. To spend some time working on a Sunday evening is for some a way to feel comfortable and prepared for the week to come, while for others that is a totally wrong approach.

When I applied for my current position I remember clearly telling "my boss to come" that taking home my laptop from work is something I rarely would do. In demanding times I rather plan for a few late evenings in the office if needed. This is what I am doing right now. I need to leave for my weekly spinning class. But the workload this week demands some extra hours and therefor I will stay a bit longer in the office tomorrow evening. That is worklife balance for me.

I feel privileged to work with a manager and in an organization that highly values the worklife balance of our employees. Even if it might be periods when people have a very bad worklife balance I am confident that having a climate where the topic has a space on the agenda is the best way to address the issue. And of course, walk the talk. Something I think my manager does very well :-)