I saw this article via Finance Opti. He shared that
DBS CEO Piyush Gupta thinks work-life balance is ‘baloney’ & that work is part of life
But he disagrees with the statement above and brought up the an interesting point
For example, the NUS President is able to have morning walks and talk to his staff at the same time – killing 2 birds with one stone. If you are an employee expected to toil in front of the computer the whole day, if you tell your boss you are going out for a morning walk, he will not take it nicely, right?
NUS President Tan Eng Chye on university rankings and morning walks with staff
For employees, they just do not have enough freedom to manage their time during work hours. As such, work is work. After work, they need to take care of themself/family. So for employees, it is best to keep work and life separate.
Also, employees just don’t have enough ‘skin in the game’ to merge work with life. If they do office work outside office hours, what do they get? Maybe a bigger bonus when it comes to the next round of performance review. For business owners it is different. If their business takes off, the rewards are much more.
What do you think?
When you are in the management role, you can choose and plan your time. You don’t need to sit in your desk from 8.30am to 6pm daily, there is no such thing as work from home or work from office because you can come in and leave anytime as long as the office need you. In fact, for those super high level, you have minion to serve you when you come to office.
That’s why they can make work part of life, especially they are so highly paid with so much flexibility of time.
What about employee?
Whereas, for normal employees, firstly pay are not that high and recently, many of the bosses also like the employee to be in office. You can see from the many recent articles that the offices keep calling the employee to come back to office. Since we are talking about NUS above as example, I saw in this forum saying that NUS is changing from 3 days WFO, 2 days WFH To 4 days WFO, 1 day WFH.
How can a normal employee go out for morning walk when you are supposed to sit and stare at the computer from 830am to 6pm? (even though COVID shows us that many of the works can be done from home. so irony…)
Expectation of high ranking bosses vs normal employees are different.
Conclusion…
Work is part of Life if you are the top flyer with high salary and has the full flexibility of time where as you can work when necessary. For such person, you will work forever and enjoy steady paycheck.
For normal employee, work is only small part of life, to earn that little money for yourself and family to survive. Hence, people want work life balance, more work from home to account for better work life balance/flexible schedule since it has proven that it works during the COVID time.
If money is not a concern, people sure quit and fight for Financial Freedom so that can take back their time. To them, work is only small part of time.