Work-Life Balance and the Corporate Family

Rethinking the Work-Life Divide and the need for Balance

Recent years have seen increased use of the “family” metaphor to describe corporate cultures. The intent behind this metaphor—and it is important to note that metaphors tend toward decay in significance—seems positive: creating supportive, connected workplaces that are meaningful beyond bottom-lines and profit-margins. By construing one’s colleagues as family, the company encourages stronger bonds between employees, both among themselves and to the company. We spend so much time working: shouldn’t it be worth our dedication? But this ill-fitted jargon is, of course, much-hated.

The Corporate Presupposition

Corporations, historically, were constituted as entities to fulfill tasks exceeding the capacities of individuals. Long-distance trading groups, farming consortiums, and those who built infrastructure (say, aqueducts or roads in the Roman Empire) functioned as corporations of a kind. The European guilds of tradesmen from the 12th through the early 17th centuries, though looser in scope and distribution of profit than corporations, likewise had collective organization and legal recognition.

The modern corporation, however, while it retains much of antiquity, today has a greater separation from the common good than either ancient corporations or medieval guilds. With the standardization of currencies and the technological improvements of industry that made feasible massive increases in production, the corporation could shift away from reliance upon and integration within the community. In consequence, the end-goal for such detached corporations is neither the good of the tradesmen nor of the community, but invariably they exist within a pre-determined and pre-supposed structure that places profit as their final cause. In other words, even if a company decides to be ecologically conscious, family-oriented, to engage its employees in profit-sharing, to give back to the community—all of these decisions are incidental to its existence as a corporation. Productivity, the bringing-into-being-of-that-which-brings-profit, is the raison d’etre of the company’s existence.

Work against Life against Work

So long as this presupposition is taken for granted, the “work-life” balance question cannot be correctly answered: for we presume a dichotomy that is contrary to our very nature as human beings. All of the problems that are aimed at (however ineptly) by construing corporations as “family”—burnout, “boreout” (decreased job satisfaction), the “quiet-quitting” of the post-pandemic world, inability to enjoy one’s personal life—should not even be problems in the first place.

That is, we have accepted a framework—one largely created by an unthinking adoption of technological innovations—for our way of existing that pits us against ourselves. Why are “work” and “life” divided against one another such that they need balance in the first place? How have we found ourselves in the situation that “work” is not regarded as a part of life?

If we are to fix our “work-life balance”, we need to have work that integrates into our lives such that they form a coherent whole—not of parts artlessly joined together, but of an organic unity that is truly human.

Realistic Re-Thinking

Consulting promises many magic bullets: fire off this idea and everything will be fixed. This works well with simple problems. It does not work with complex difficulties. The nature of flawed corporate culture resists magic bullet solutions—as, indeed, flawed cultures of any kind. For culture exists in the complex pattern of relations between those who live within the culture, arising from the ideas and beliefs put into practice by the individuals. Ideas and beliefs do not change quickly, for they are matters of habit.

And so while corporations can attempt to build bridges between work and life, so long as they conceive of themselves as essentially detached entities, constituted by neither community nor persons, they will continue to dig deeper the chasms that separate their productivity from an integral humanity.

I cannot provide a solution: but I can suggest that an approach to this difficulty can be taken by new companies; companies that ensure they understand and believe themselves not to be detached entities, but to be integrated into the human lives by which they are constituted. As you attempt to reconceive and subsequently reimagine our corporate cultures—the patterns of relations constituting our “work-lives”—do they look more human? In what ways?