Work-life Balance Exercise

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Work-life balance

The Work-Life Balance exercise can help you create a holistic view of your work life.

Use the Work-life balance evaluation below to work through each of 13 questions, one by one - reflect on your life as it is now and mark your satisfaction level on a scale of 1-10 for that segment/slice, where:

… a “zero” means you are deeply unhappy and concerned, and spend a lot of time worrying about this topic,

… and a “ten” means you are completely satisfied and spend very little time worrying about this topic.

The Work-Life Balance Summary will show your evaluation ratings as you complete them.

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When you’re done, open your Work-life balance chart and consider your work-life balance overall.

Those segments where you scored your satisfaction as a 6 or lower will then also show as “cards” in the Create Work-Life Balance goals section.

Use the drop down list to select the one aspect of your work-life that you would like to fix right now - the area of your work-life that can have the most impact on your life balance overall, complete “My ‘10’ for segment” and “Goal for segment” and submit these.

Use this

Reset workife balance evaluation

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button to reset the satisfaction ratings if necessary.

Note: While you may use this exercise to identify and improve areas of your work-life with your current employment situation, you may also get value from this exercise in cases where you are seeking new employment, to help you understand the work-life environment that suits you best - in those cases, consider and evaluate your previous work environment, and then, when you consider “what a ‘10’ looks like” for each segment, think about all your prior jobs and what you really enjoyed about those jobs as the basis for evaluation.

Note: Refer to the

“How to complete this exercise”⁠

section below for more details on how to complete this exercise.

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Work-life balance evaluation

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Career development

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Submit

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Do you have a clear path for career development? Is it aligned with your own personal goals, strengths, values and purpose? Are the multiple paths available for career development that support technical or leadership development tracks?

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Work-life balance summary

Dimension

Satisfaction

Career development

Contribution to society

Finances now and future

Fulfilment, recognition

Leadership and management

Mission and vision

Peer Network

Personal development and growth

Social network

Team dynamics

Values alignment

Workplace culture

Workplace health and stress

There are no rows in this table

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Your work-life balance chart

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Create work-life balance goals

Each of the cards below represents one of the Work-life Balance segments where you evaluated your satisfaction as a “6” or lower.

In order to create a goal for any card, use this drop-down list

Blank

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to select the segment and create a goal for that segment.

You can create multiple goals here BUT, I recommend you focus on just one goal and look for a leverage segment - one that impacts on the score of several others.

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Add what a 10 looks like

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Create goal

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Work-life balance cards

Below is a card for each of the 13 work-life balance segments. You can click on a card to open it and check/adjust details.Take a screenshot of these cards as a record of your work-life balance.

Finances now and future

Questions to consider

Consider your current income (salary, bonuses and benefits). Are you satisfied that your income is sufficient for your lifestyle? In alignment with your peers? In alignment with the value you deliver? Is your future income sufficient for your future lifestyle?

Satisfaction

Score

Workplace health and stress

Questions to consider

Are you satisfied that your working environment promotes health and safety? Is the balance between home and office work aligned with your needs? Are your working environments ergonomically optimised? Are mechanisms available to support you in managing stress to a reasonable level?

Satisfaction

Score

Career development

Questions to consider

Do you have a clear path for career development? Is it aligned with your own personal goals, strengths, values and purpose? Are the multiple paths available for career development that support technical or leadership development tracks?

Satisfaction

Score

Social network

Questions to consider

Consider the friends you have within your organisation and in partner companies. Do you enjoy an active social network within the company? Is such a social network encouraged and supported?

Satisfaction

Score

Team dynamics

Questions to consider

Consider your own team – do they perform as a high performing team? Are you proud to be a contributor to that team? Consider the other teams that you are part of in your organisation – are teams effective in general?

Satisfaction

Score

Leadership and management

Questions to consider

Consider your immediate manager? How satisfied are you with mutual trust between you? Do you respect their capabilities? Consider the leadership team of your organisation, do you have confidence of their abilities to lead? Are they present, approachable and available?

Satisfaction

Score

Workplace culture

Questions to consider

Does the company actively encourage a culture based on autonomy, growth of the individual, personal accountability, honest feedback and learning?

Satisfaction

Score

Personal development and growth

Questions to consider

Does the company encourage and support your personal development and growth? Are resources assigned for this purpose? Do you have the time to develop and achieve the growth goals you have agreed or need?

Satisfaction

Score

Fulfilment, recognition

Questions to consider

Do you receive personal feedback and recognition? Are mechanisms in place to allow you to provide feedback and recognition to others?

Satisfaction

Score

Peer Network

Questions to consider

Consider your peer network. Do you have strong connections with other colleagues inside your organisation as peers?

Satisfaction

Score

Contribution to society

Questions to consider

Are there stated sustainability goals and the implicit sustainability goals (integral with the products or services that your company delivers)? Are these aligned with your own contribution to society goals?

Satisfaction

Score

Mission and vision

Questions to consider

How well are your own life goals, direction and purpose aligned with the company mission, vision and goals?

Satisfaction

Score

Values alignment

Questions to consider

Are the corporate values in sufficient alignment with your personal values? Can you live according to your personal values in your work life?

Satisfaction

Score

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Reflection

Take a moment to consider what elements of your work-life are important for you and how your work life impacts on your life overall. If you’re considering a change or new venture, what elements of your work life do you want to retain or change as you move forward?

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Overview

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In his book

Drive⁠

, Daniel H. Pink describes “Type X” and “type I” behaviours and associated drivers.

“Type X” people tend to focus mainly on extrinsic drivers, external rewards such as recognition and financial incentives, whereas “Type I” people tend to focus more on intrinsic rewards, autonomy, mastery and purpose. He goes on to state that people who are mainly “Type I” focussed will outperform “Type x” people in the long run.

You can use this exercise to assess your current or past employment experience along 13 dimensions of business life – from this you can:

Consider what changes you would like to make in your work-life to align better with your personal life.

Consider the job characteristics you would desire from a future employment engagement.

Consider the work-life environment and culture you would like to build within your new start-up business.

The research behind this exercise

This work-life balance exercise is loosely based on the principles of Daniel H. Pink in his book

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, coupled with the life experiences from working with coaching clients. In his book, Daniel Pink introduces the concept of the “Motivation 3.0 operating system—the upgrade that’s needed to meet the new realities of how we organise, think about, and do what we do”. He continues by referring to “Type I” behaviour… “fuelled more by intrinsic desires than extrinsic ones.” These desires are summarised as “autonomy”, “mastery” and “purpose” and are now recognised as the primary drivers for worklife motivation.

Much of this work is founded on the

Theory of Self-Determination⁠

, a theory of human motivation developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Motivation, in this context, is what moves us to act. The theory looks at the inherent, positive human tendency to move towards growth, and outlines three core needs which facilitate that growth. Those needs are Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness (

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)

Competence – The need to experience our behaviours as effectively enacted (to feel like we’ve done a good job).

Autonomy – The need to experience behaviour as voluntary and “…reflectively self-endorsed” (to feel like we have control over what we do).

Relatedness – The need to “…interact, be connected to, and experience caring for others” (to have meaningful relationships and interactions with other people).

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How to complete this exercise

Part 1 - Assess your work-life environment. The Work-Life Balance exercise contains 13 work-life segments that describe the main attributes of work life.

To complete the assessment, consider each of these 13 work life segments and rate your satisfaction level with that aspect of your work life on a scale of 0-10, where 10=completely satisfied. Mark your satisfaction level with an “x” along the scale to the right of the segment description.

These 13 segments are shown below as cards. to conduct the evaluation, click on each card in turn, read the text, reflect on the questions and make your assessment. The results will then show on the graph (also below).

For the sake of this evaluation, satisfaction is a combination of satisfaction (how happy you are concerning this topic) and importance (how significant this topic is for you) - meaning that if one aspect of your work life has no relevance for you right now then you might score it a 10, irrespective of how satisfied you are. But use this sparingly as it can render the exercise useless!

Part 2 (optional) create a work life balance goal. Once you have completed the Work Life Balance tool, take the time to reflect on how it looks. Consider those segments where you scored a “6” or lower and especially those segments where you scored the lowest.

Imagine you have a “magic wand”. If there was one thing you could wish for to make your work life significantly better – what would that be?

If you have also completed the Life Balance Wheel, then consider the topic of congruence – does your work-life fit well with your life balance? What could you do to improve the congruence between your work life and personal life?

Finally, consider what you could do now to move towards your “what a ‘10’ looks like vision. This becomes a goal for you to develop in later exercises.

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