Construction Trailblazers: Paving The Way to Excellence

[00:00:00] Welcome to Construction Trailblazers Paving the Way to Excellence Your go-to podcast for innovation, success, and streamlined excellence in the building industry. I'm Samantha C. Prestige, your host and expert in operations and processes. I've seen the Transformative effects of adopting smart, efficient processes.

These changes not only boost company revenue, but also restore peace of mind for owners overwhelmed by the daily grind. Today we're diving into what is consistently proving to be controversial, mythical, and sometimes overhyped in a lot of LinkedIn content and leadership development circles. It's understanding work-life balance.

Or the myth of it. So really getting into into the deep stuff of what this daily grind really looks like, right? If you're all about leaving behind the daily firefighting and moving towards a future of freedom and predictable success, then you're in the right place. Discover more [00:01:00] about us and catch up on past episodes@constructiontrailblazers.com.

Let's get into it. I have found that it is so easy for people to get stuck in a very black and white view of what work-life balance means, and they really forget the core concept of this word. I. So I see this come out in a few different ways when it comes out wrong. First is the cliche overworked person.

So despite all the hype and attention that work-life balance and preventing burnout, topics got during the pandemic and then in the post covid work world, there are still a lot of people that have just kind of ignored all the research, all the strategies on this and are on the verge of. Burnout pretty much every week, and they are missing out on a lot of great work opportunities and a lot of the amazing moments in their personal lives.

Another way we see this come across in the wrong way are people that are super strict about what they think [00:02:00] work-life balance means. So they have created very rigid routines for themselves, like. This from this time block to this time block is for work only. Anything after that is personal only. So there's not a lot of flexibility that they have to take advantage of new work opportunities or to allow personal moments and personal time to maybe overlap with some work stuff.

Lastly, we also see people take this to the other extreme of too much personal and not enough work. And I mean, if you have the money to only work a few hours a week, by all means go for it. But if you run a company, then your company and your team probably need more from you. And if you're an employee, then your manager is definitely expecting more from you.

So none of these three approaches are really maintainable in the long run. They just are not gonna work out, and that's because we've forgotten the core of this, which is simply balance. If you have listened to any of my other content, read any of of my other content on our website blog or [00:03:00] on my LinkedIn, that, you know, I'm all about simplicity.

So simple balance here is what we're looking for, and instead of just thinking of it's work versus life, and we forget that all of this. Everything we do is just life, right? And there's a balance between how much energy we give to things that are important, like making, making an income, supporting our family, having a roof over our heads, all those things and the things that truly matter, like those personal moments.

I. So I don't know if we need to rephrase things. I know so often we get caught up on the words, right? So do we need to rephrase this to work-life blend, or the business to personal balance or what have you. Whatever makes sense to you as long as you're remembering that the key, the core to the whole concept, no matter what you're calling it, is really in the flexibility and the simplicity of it all and understanding that it looks different for everyone.

For instance, for me this past year, it meant that I didn't start working on Wednesdays until about 10 30 in the [00:04:00] morning because I was taking my 4-year-old to his gymnastics class and this place was so awesome and they all their other classes filled up really quickly on the weekends. So the only class opportunities were on it were during the week, so I signed him up for a Wednesday morning class.

So that meant that my first hour for. All the Wednesdays from September through May was really me choosing what I was gonna do. So sometimes it meant I was reading and just doing some personal things for me while he was in class. Other times it meant I was knocking out some low hanging fruit off of my work task list because I knew I would always have at least 45 minutes without any work calls about any other interruptions.

So I could really hone in on, on a few of those things. So again, it's not a clear cut rigid schedule for me. I didn't start working at 10 30 on every day. It was only on Wednesdays that I had this schedule. And I also didn't say, okay, I'm only gonna take this class time to focus on personal stuff and it's, this has to be my self-care time.

Right. It [00:05:00] was no. Sometimes it's work, sometimes it's personal. So there was the flexibility that I built in, and also I had the boundaries with my team and with my clients to be able to not take meetings until 10 30 or later so that I can have that flexibility and not stress. During his gymnastics class time and, and again, it's really about finding those moments where you can blend work and life in a way that works for you and is not gonna cross your boundaries that make you feel burnt out and exhausted.

Come Friday evening, right, and make you dread on Sunday, make you dread coming to work on Monday. And this is a concept that I have to work on a lot with my clients as we're evaluating processes and trying to clean up day-to-Day Chaos. A huge factor when looking at process efficiency is understanding a team's productivity.

I. And this will often go beyond the redundancies or inefficiencies in a process or the lack of automation in your tech stack. It's also going to involve understanding what a work-life balance or [00:06:00] blend looks like for your employees, right? I am, I'm never gonna build an entire process based around one employee, but understanding that there's flexibility, understanding that these are the employees that you currently have.

Let's make your, your current team excel. That's what's really gonna bring some of this process excellence to life. So we're asking how can we do things better, easier, and more efficiently, but in a way that our current employees, our current team, can still enjoy showing up to work. I am gonna take one of examples that I had with a, a client conversation recently.

So this client was complaining to me about an employee who was getting really chatty with the receptionist, and the same employee also tends to not stay very late, very often. And so they're really wanting to understand like, what are the things that we can do to help to, to manage this employee?

What's the feedback we need to give them? What are the processes that we might need to change? Or what are the things being affected by this person being [00:07:00] chatty and also not staying late, right? So it's kind of a peculiar situation. And I was like, okay, well we need to look at a few different factors here.

I need to understand what is her productivity and her performance when she's at her desk? What are the reasons why she's leaving early? Right? So it's not just that she wasn't staying late, it's that she was maybe leaving a little earlier than she was supposed to be. And what are the expectations she's supposed to be meeting, right?

So let's look at, let's look at the whole picture here and not just this one challenge that you're looking at. If we start with productivity and performance. She's actually a, a high performing employee, so she typically always gets her work done and sometimes even more than what she was supposed to get done in a given day.

She's never meeting or never missing her deadlines. She doesn't have a lot of issues with other employees. So pretty good team member overall, right? Meeting performance expectations and a great cultural fit. So we've got a box checked there. That's awesome. She's also, when we look at her job [00:08:00] description, she's got a lot of responsibilities that can end up being tedious and sometimes monotonous.

So it's actually totally understandable that she might take more breaks or have maybe longer chattier breaks throughout the day than maybe someone who has a lot more problem solving or variation in their daily workload. For our brains to maintain productivity, to maintain motivation, we do need to switch it up more often, right?

So it's not a realistic expectation, whether it's this person or anyone else that's gonna fill this role. It's not a realistic expectation that they're gonna come to work at 8:00 AM and they're gonna sit down and be at peak productivity all throughout their all until their lunch break. Take their lunch break, and then come back an hour later, 30 minutes later or whatever.

Then be at peak productivity all the way until the end of the day, especially when they have very tedious and monotonous responsibilities. Those people are gonna need a more frequent breaks, even if they're short, five, 10 minute breaks. Or when they do take a break, [00:09:00] they do have their, their lunch break.

They're probably not gonna watch us 30 minutes. They're probably gonna need 45 to 60 minutes just to give their brain that time to reset, to experience something different, right? To have that variation in their workload. On top of that, why is she maybe leaving a little bit earlier? Right? So she's not leaving hours earlier.

She's leaving maybe 20 to 30 minutes earlier. Well, the main reason here is that she's a mom, so she simply cannot stay late, and sometimes she can't stay all the way till five o'clock because she has to adhere to daycare hours. So she's got other personal priorities that are going to dictate some of her work boundaries, right?

She is not gonna want to pay for extended care at the daycare. She's gonna wanna pick up her child on time, right? So whether or not she's got monetary consequences to being late, also totally reasonable that a mom, a parent, a dad, what have you. Is gonna wanna see their kid. Right? Um, So it's okay [00:10:00] that she's not staying late.

She's got some personal things that she wants to take care of, and understanding that it's okay that people have personal priorities, understanding that an employee, right, it's not the CEO o it's not the owner. An employee is like the company and their work is never gonna be at the top of their priority list, and it should never be at the top of their priority list because they have other things going on.

Right. Even if they're not a parent, they have other personal priorities and that's okay. So just because other employees are staying late or other people are taking their work home, doesn't mean that she's not a hard worker. It doesn't mean that she doesn't care. In fact, if we're really looking at productivity and efficiency, then we should actually be questioning why people are taking work home, why they have to work late a lot and why they can't get their work done within a regular workday.

Right? What are the inefficiencies. Are we understaffed? That actually deserves more questioning than this person leaving 20 to 30 minutes early each day. On top of that, right? 'cause we wanna look at the whole picture. On top of that, we wanna look at the receptionist, [00:11:00] right? Often receptionists are actually in a pretty lonely position.

We sometimes think of receptionists, an office manager, whoever's at at that, whoever's at that front desk to be maybe really chatty, very extroverted, very. Social. Even if they are have an extroverted person, they are usually at the front of the office with no one else around, right? You're very rarely gonna see a reception desk that's accommodating multiple people sitting there and multiple people working.

So everyone else's cubicles, everyone else's offices are usually away from reception. So this person's only talking to people when they're answering their phones, which usually means they're talking to a disgruntled customer or solving a problem for a customer. They. Often, even though it doesn't, it might sound ironic, maybe it doesn't sound true at first.

They usually have the least amount of social interaction in an office unless other employees stop by their desk and talk to them. Or you know, when they catch other people on their lunch breaks. So there is also a benefit here of this employee just taking some time to chat it up with [00:12:00] the receptionist and make sure that that person feels welcomed and part of the team.

'cause they can often kind of be their own silo. So what's the takeaway from all of this? It's really just about understanding that work-life balance isn't a strict divide, it's a blend.

There's a lot of understanding that has to go into it for us to have the balance that works for us and for owners and managers to not be burnt out, but for us to also understand what work-life balance means for our employees. Right? Are they meeting our expectations? Are, do they have the productivity and performance that we need them to?

And if so. There's probably some exceptions. There's probably some boundaries that we can understand here because they are a great employee to hold onto. And when we recognize that we can create work environments that are not only more efficient, but also just plain out, more enjoyable for everyone.

So thank you for tuning into this episode of Construction Trailblazers. I hope you found it insightful. And if you have your own story about finding work-life balance, or understanding the boundaries in your employees that [00:13:00] prove to help with efficiency and productivity, then I'd love to hear it.

Please share your story with us at hello@constructiontrailblazers.com.