As you’re reading this, I’m running around McKinley West in Taguig making sure everything is where they should be in preparation for the fun run that will take place in the evening. I’m doing this because I’m one of the project heads of the event, which has been four months in the making. I probably haven’t slept in two days – I’m cranky, bitchy and impatient.
As with any event, tensions are high and proverbial fires have to be put out on the spot. Plan A never works, so you must be prepared with about half a dozen contingencies. Events agencies may not be responsible for ending world poverty and hunger, but we are given the daunting task of making sure that all stakeholders are happy and they leave the venue after the event safe and unharmed.
That’s not easy. Every event is a security risk and logistical nightmare. But we still do it – I still do it because I love it. I love my job, even if I never clock out at 6 p.m. My meetings would end at 10:00 p.m. if I’m lucky; 3:00 a.m. if I’m not. Pulling all-nighters and working on weekends are part of the job description.
Did I know from the start that this was what I was signing up for? Hell to the N-O! I thought it would be glamorous and all I’d have to do is walk around with a clipboard and talk to people through the comm set attached to my head. I had no idea that there are months of planning and troubleshooting and budgeting and building stuff. (I was idealistic, okay?!) But do I regret being an events guy? Of course not… Like I said, I love my job.
I actually enjoy the all-nighters and the endless meetings because the people I work with are also my friends. Most of our meetings would happen at coffee shops and restaurants, which means that the environment is relaxed and we can easily glide from work-related discussions to personal conversations when we feel our brains getting fried.
My job doesn’t allow for work-life balance. Instead, it offers something more valuable: work-life blend. It’s a classic case of mixing business with pleasure, but on a grand scale. Work-life blend has gone from obscure to trendy to necessary in just a few short years because of technology.
Before mobile phones and email, “work” and “life” were separate entities. Back then, we refused to acknowledge work as a part of life. It was just something that we did from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. to earn money so that we could fund our lives. They rarely intersected, much less blended. The only time employees truly socialized with one another was at Christmas parties and the once-a-year company outings. (Even the term “company outing” sounded so corporate. Now, they’re called team-building and they’re meant to truly bring people together and recognize the individual as part of a cohesive team.)
But because we’re connected to the Internet all the time and our mobile phones make sure we’re always within reach, gone are the days when clients have to wait until the next business day to call you on the company landline. As work invades our dinner tables and bedrooms, it only makes sense that we bring those tables and beds to the office – figuratively of course. Since we’ve practically lost our official “me time” at night, we have to find ways to carve them into our hectic days. And we need the help and blessing of our employers to do it.
According to work/life satisfaction guru Jones Loflin, work-life blend has three tenets. Writing at LinkedIn Pulse, he listed them down as follows: flexibility, focusing on outcomes, and encouraging collaboration.
Flexibility pertains to seamless transition between work and personal time. It provides for opportunities to recharge by being able to get away when needed, and not being bound by strict schedules. Meanwhile, being outcome-oriented means it’s quality (of work) over quantity (of time spent in the office). It’s a productivity-based scheme that maximizes the employees’ “creative energies” and allows them to take part in their respective “life events.” Finally, collaboration talks about being able to have productive relationships with coworkers that can only be had by working together on projects and not isolating each member and forcing them to work on their own.
“By rethinking balance and seeking to blend, not only will we feel less guilty about them mixing together, but we will find ourselves more realistically able to have both working for us,” offer Success.com’s Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan.
Work-life blend is not difficult. It’s simply a matter of not thinking of the office as “the office,” where you have to be at the most extreme side of professionalism. Work-life balance is a more casual and worker-friendly approach to getting things done and finding solutions to maximize productivity without sacrificing personal needs and inclinations, thus yielding the most positive of results.
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