More on Work/Life Balance

People work so that they can enjoy life, not the other way around. This is something that some in management positions forget. These managers require their staff to work long hours and will even threaten the withholding of permission to take vacations until a project that is behind schedule through no fault of the staff is handled. They will do this and then provide no positive reinforcement when the staff performs the 'miracle', instead they denigrate the staff for not doing that work sooner. A manager's job is to manage their staff and that includes managing the projects of their staff which includes factoring in reality. True miracles can occur but they are rare and those that do happen are because of extra effort by the staff who gave up some of their precious personal time.

Granted there are times in any organization where there are urgent projects that require overtime, sometimes for an extended period of time. When this happens it is managements job to realize this and provide relief for the staff by bringing in temporary help from other teams or from outside the company. Any extended period where the staff is working extended hours drains the energy, morale, and quality of work of the staff that will hurt in the long run if not resolved.

When your staff's work/life balance is out of balance because of the requirements of the job it is your job to resolve this. Typically it means that there is a failure somewhere in the management planning process. In my case this was a failure of several years of attempting to get by with the bare minimum investment in the infrastructure, not adding the necessary staff as the number of users of the infrastructure grew, and then not accepting that this could not be resolved by forcing the staff to work 'smarter'. The challenge of making this case to your management is not to be underestimated as they may be those who made the decisions or are being directed (indirectly or indirectly) to improve things within the constraints of the current budget and in some cases within the constraints of a budget that has been reduced to meet some unrealistic target (e.g. 10% less than the prior year). When this happens it is your job to make your management aware and if they don't provide any relief your challenge is to try to run interference between upper managements expectations and the health and wellbeing of your staff.