Managing boundaries is key to managing our energy levels when we return to work after parental leave. But how do we do this effectively?
What does managing boundaries mean?
Managing boundaries, or managing work life balance, is how we manage the differentiation between our work life and home life or other spheres in which we spend our time. Each sphere of our life has physical, psychological and emotional requirements of us and we will have a preference for how we like these spheres of our lives to interact with each other. As a result, our boundaries can be physical, psychological or emotional.
The integrator-separator continuum
Your preference for managing how your roles in life blend together is key to managing your boundaries.
An integrator is happy for the different areas of their life to mix and blur. People with this preference found the switch to home working during lockdown more easy to adapt to as they welcomed the ability to integrate home tasks into their working day and vice versa.
A separator prefers to keep work and non-work completely separate. Working from home during lockdown was more stressful for people with this preference as the different areas of their life crashed together providing little to no opportunity to separate work from home life.
Psychologists see the preferences for integration and separation of work and home life as a continuum, so you may find you sit somewhere between the two. You might have a more complicated preference, such as integrating in nursery/school holidays, but separating during term time.
Why is managing boundaries hard?
Typically we find it hard managing boundaries when we aren’t able to maintain our preferred style of working, either due to our workplace culture or, often, our own behaviour. The ‘always on’ culture so prevalent in organisations today means there is often an expectation for us to be available to answer questions or continue with work outside our working hours, which can make it more difficult to manage our boundaries.
What are the benefits of managing boundaries between work and home life?
Managing boundaries successfully enables us to manage our energy levels which enhances our wellbeing. It can:
- help reduce conflict between the different roles in our lives
- reduce stress and burnout
- improve mental and physical health
- increase employee engagement
- reduce turnover
- create a more diverse workforce
- make our workplace a more attractive place to work
- reduce costs and absenteeism
What can I do to manage my boundaries better?
Once you know how you would like the different areas of your life to sit together, the next step is to look at where your different worlds clash. These questions can help you reflect on these clashes and then create and manage boundaries that will help you manage them:
- What are the main pinch points for you in your working day when it comes to managing boundaries between home and work life?
- What is the most common cause for an issue at this pinch point?
- In an ideal world, what would this part of your day look like if everything was working as you’d like it to?
- What do you need to put in place to create and maintain a boundary and work towards creating your ideal?
- Who can help you with this?
- How can technology help you create and manage this new boundary?
- If there’s one thing that might hold you back from maintaining your new boundary, what is it? And how can you mitigate against this?
Once you have thought over these questions, capture your ideas about how you would like to manage your boundaries so you can talk them through with your Manager and ideally your colleagues too. If you start to feel things are slipping, revisit these questions again. And it’s definitely worth looking over these questions at least every few months to try to prevent overwhelm and potentially burnout.
Would you like help in managing boundaries?
If you’d like more support in managing your boundaries at work, this is something we can help with. Drop us an email at hello@thematernitycoach.com and let’s talk.
