The potential is high for hybrid working to enable people to have more fulfilled, more productive lives replete with accomplishments and fulfilment in terms of both work and personal life. The practice frequently misses the mark. Commuting may have been a pain, but it provided valuable mental down time. Working from home can easily become working longer and not being able to switch off. Without rigorous planning and discipline, we can end up with less exercise and more stress.
Two opposing perspectives underpin most discussion of these issues. One is that the employee should take ownership of how they organise their time and energy, and how they juggle responsibilities. The other is that the employer should be creating the conditions, where a healthy work-life balance is possible. Both are simultaneously right and wrong, because they look at the issues through simplistic lenses. The reality is that the relationship between employer and employee is a complex adaptive system, subject to constant change. It’s made even more complex by the involvement of multiple other players in the system – in particular, other employees, family and dependents.
Family friendly policies have limited impact because they address only one part of the system. For example, they miss entirely the circumstances of the workaholic, the perceived necessity of the career ambitious person to be seen to contribute above and beyond, or the low-income family, where fewer hours in one job simply creates opportunities for secondary employment.
Reviewing my own research and writings on work-life balance more than two decades ago, I am struck by the linearity of my own perceptions and those of the experts I quoted. This has led me to reflect on two fundamental questions:
- What does an “optionally functional individual” (OFI) in the workplace look like?
- How might more systemic approaches enable organisations and their employees to find better ways to create optionally functional teams and organisations, by facilitating employees to become optionally functioning individuals?
One way to define an OFI is “a person, who is able employ their interests and energies to satisfy multiple needs of themselves and their key stakeholders consistently over time”. Among implications of this definition are:
- The demands on their time and energy are balanced with the resources they have — recuperation time is built into their daily routines
- They are able to make and stick to choices about what is most important, for both the present and the future
- They have strong networks of support (both practical and psychological) in each of the contexts that demands their attention.
These same three principles apply equally at the levels of teams and to organisations. Yet we treat each of the three levels as separate issues, rather than as a complex, adaptive system, where each element affects every other.
Let’s take each of the threads in this system in turn. The energy an individual is able to direct towards their work is affected by multiple factors, including how purposeful the work is to them, their sense of being supported by colleagues, their level of belongingness within a team, how much sleep they had, the level of psychological safety they feel, whether the pace of work allows for recuperative downtime between tasks, anxieties generated from work and non-work sources, their sense of efficacy and being in control, and their general well-being. Teams also have ebbs and flows in their energy, with the collective psyche affected by many of the same factors, as well as systemic factors, such as clarity of purpose, resource availability, and status within the hierarchy of functions. Organisational energy is affected by factors, such as connection to wider social purpose, trust in the leadership and the ethical climate.
The ability to make good choices equally applies at all three levels. Few people have the luxury to allocate their time entirely as they feel fit. We are constrained by responsibilities and resource limitations that often make us choose between bad and least bad alternatives. A critical issue is the extent to which team norms and organisational policies enhance or constrain individual choice. A simple example is how work is allocated in a team. Is it assigned according to who can already do the task, or who will benefit from learning to do it, were they given the option? At a corporate level, companies that give employees time to work on their own enthusiasms expand corporate choice by harvesting the innovations that emerge from these individual and team efforts.
Networks of support are also essential at all three levels. One of the most significant and powerful sources of support for individuals is from their colleagues. Simple habits — like being able to share with colleagues each week the things you are looking forward to and those you are not – can have a massive impact on sense of well-being, and ability to focus on what’s important. The concept of “teams of teams” translates this behaviour into the system of interconnecting teams within an organisation. And at an organisational level, survival and corporate well-being increasingly depend upon how the company gains and maintains the support of its stakeholders. A critical question for all companies today is: “(How much) do our stakeholders want us to succeed?”
All of which points to challenging conclusion: focusing on any one of these three levels of well-being or optional functioning can only have very limited success, because each part of the system is dependent on the others. It’s high time for companies to reposition well-being as a complex, adaptive system and apply appropriate systemic thinking to creating virtuous circles of well-being between individuals, teams and the organization.
Many of the systemic solutions are there, waiting to be applied. For example, we have employee assistance programmes for employees – with the rapidly evolving discipline of team coaching, it’s easy to create similar “team assistance programmes”. All it needs is imagination and a systemic way of thinking!
©️David Clutterbuck, 2025