Balance or burnout | Is 'work-life balance' still relevant, or is the term outdated?

When we discuss harmonising work and personal life, there’s a simple term that encapsulates the debate – work-life balance.

It’s a phrase you, as a HR professional, probably know only too well. In fact, with burnout on the rise, mental health seemingly in crisis and workers forced to take time off due to the strains of working life, it’s probably a term that you’ve used yourself many, many times.

But is it the right term to truly encompass creating harmony between time spent working and time spent doing everything else? It may seem like a frustratingly inconsequential quibble, yet the words we use around our people are weighted, and in trying to embrace work-life balance, we may actually be getting our perceptions of this issue wrong. It may be that work-life balance doesn’t truly encapsulate our multifaceted lives and aspirations.

To work this out, we’re going to have to go backward a bit. The aftermath of the pandemic prompted the average worker to come to some pretty significant conclusions. Many people realised in this time that they’d been pushing themselves to exhaustion. It may have been losing a loved one or even becoming ill themselves that brought about the realisation that life is too short to compromise personal health and wellbeing for a job.