Have You Chunked Your Life Lately?

The Economist's special report on work-life balance included a piece titled "Life Beyond Pay."* "Improving the balance between the working part of the day and the rest of it is a goal of a growing number of workers in rich Western countries," according to the magazine.

The report focuses primarily on flexible work schedules as a way to increase employee happiness and retention. Under this umbrella is not just the expected flexible hours, but also flexible leaves and even career re-entry (principally for women who stopped working to have children).

The magazine believes this is a generational change:

The demand is being stoked by the “Generation Y”, the under-28s. They look sceptically at the idea of lifetime employment within a single organisation and they are wary of the commitment they believe too often drove their parents to the divorce courts. Hay's Ms Murlis says that today's business-school graduates are “looking for a workstyle to go with their lifestyle”, not the other way round. They are happy to binge-work for a while, but in return want extended sabbaticals in which to chill out.

and later:

Charles Handy, the author of several books on the changing nature of work, says that young workers today are increasingly “chunking” their lives, dividing them into discrete bits. These include work, parenting, travelling and doing something completely different. He believes this marks a change in attitude that is slowly filtering down from elite knowledge workers to manufacturing employees.

Heavy lay-offs in the early 1990s, mostly the result of enthusiasm for the ephemeral fad of re-engineering, changed attitudes to work. For many, downsizing sounded the death-knell for having a job for life. In “The New Deal at Work” (Harvard Business School Press), Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton business school, claims that, “while employers have quite clearly broken the old deal and its long-term commitments, they do not control the new deal...it is hard to see what could make employees give that control and responsibility back to the employer.”

The Economist takes these notions with a grain of salt, noting that a recession -- or movement of human-capital intensive jobs to India or China -- would make people far more eager to work under imperfect conditions.

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The Economist article also notes the launch this month of Success magazine, which according to its website is "the only business magazine designed to inspire and guide motivated business people to lead truly successful lives." The initial issue looks to have features such as "Do What You Love (And Get Paid For It)," "What Success Means Now," and a special section on work-life balance.