{"id":775,"date":"2017-03-31T06:00:25","date_gmt":"2017-03-31T06:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/?p=775"},"modified":"2017-03-27T14:48:12","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T14:48:12","slug":"mwr-last-time-actually-switched-off-work-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/making-work-real\/2017\/03\/mwr-last-time-actually-switched-off-work-mode\/","title":{"rendered":"MWR: When Was the Last Time You Actually Switched off Your Work Mode?"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"University<\/a>
University of Southampton Business School student, Birgit Tammiste, discusses the drawbacks of working from home.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Working from home seems to be 2 in 1, but does it actually help to find balance between work and life? Working outside of the home makes it possible to go home to relax. A woman, working from home, was asked where she goes when she wants to relax and she replied with laughter and said: \u201cNowhere, nowhere at all\u201d (Crosbie and Moore, 2004). Looks like working from home is not as enjoyable as it seemed at the first sight.<\/p>\n

A growing number of people are working from home because flexibility in workplace is nowadays the talk of the town. On the good side, spending less time on commuting leaves more time to take care of your own or family needs. For instance, walking the dog instead of driving to work in the morning (Delecta, 2011; Bearne, 2016). On the other hand, not having your colleagues and supervisors nearby leads to the need of extra meetings and that means less leisure time (Delecta, 2011). Due to technology developments working from home is easier than ever before. Flexible working patterns make working available even 2am or when being on a holiday.<\/p>\n

A woman working from home was asked where she goes when she wants to relax and she replied with laughter and said: \u201cNowhere, nowhere at all\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately this has created a connection between worker and workplace which means that employers are always available to their employees (Crosbie and Moore, 2004; Bearne, 2016). The ones who are working at home, admitted that they work more intensively because they work more hours (Crosbie and Moore, 2004). Separation between work and life\u2026 a new phenomenon?<\/p>\n

Volkswagen for example, has begun to shut off employees` emails when they are off shift. Also Daimler allowed workers to erase received emails while on holiday (Belton, 2016). Some firms are already trying to get back the separation between working and leisure.<\/p>\n

Three generations are working together for the first time ever and they all have different understanding of how work and life should be balanced. For example, baby boomers, always ready to sacrifice their family and own personal wellbeing for their employers, but still complaining about having less relaxing time. Most of them are suffering high level of stress having a full-time job and dealing with health issues at the same time. This generation is too afraid to ask for flexible working conditions, which unfortunately does not help to make changes in the business world about balancing work and life. The older they get, the more they start to thinking about flexible working conditions (Leibow, 2014; Rosato, 2015).<\/p>\n

Generation X unlike baby boomers can be described with the words: independent, less committed to their employers and technology. They care more about their own careers than about organisations, although they are the ones who started to blur the line between work and personal time as they want fun work environment and more flexibility (Gennamo and Gardner, 2008; Newman, 2016). Millennials, the youngsters want flexibility the most and they are even willing to refuse from promotion to manage to balance work and life (Rosato, 2015). As this group will be the major workforce over the next 20 years, changes in business are made because of them. Generation Y have grown up in a time where information has become available anytime everywhere which tightens the gap between work and leisure (Gilbert, 2015).<\/p>\n

Having balance between personal life and work has been a daily topic and seems to continue that way. How it should be balanced depends on the person and, perhaps, generation \u2013 but due to the unrelenting development of technology it is hard to be done.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Birgit Tammiste studies <\/em>BSc Business Management<\/em><\/a> at Southampton Business School. The views in this article are those of the author.\u00a0This article is part of the ‘Making Our Work Real’ series.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u00a0Working from home seems to be 2 in 1, but does it actually help to find balance between work and life? Working outside of the home makes it possible to go home to relax. A woman, working from home, was asked where she goes when she wants to relax and she replied with laughter and said: \u201cNowhere, nowhere at …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1030568],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-making-work-real","column","threecol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":816,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions\/816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}