Set personalised boundaries that work for you

Corina Roobeck

Have you been experiencing any of the following? An increase in the number of meetings, an increase in email exchanges, longer working hours, back to back virtual meetings, a blur between working hours, and ‘home’ time? If so, you are not alone.

Research conducted by Harvard Business School found that all of the above increased within the first two months of the crisis. We can of course experience these events in different ways and differently over time. Purpose is a powerful filter. In the early days of COVID, we were operating in the unknown. It was a new experience. We were learning and adapting as fast as possible to survive in the new world. As weeks passed, we managed our own mental health and the health and safety of others.

Now we enter a new phase and as schools and workplaces reopen it's a perfect time to communicate your needs and reset boundaries so you can perform at your best and not burn out.

So how do we go about it?

Reflecting on what's been Good, Ugly, Bad, and Awesome for yourself is a great place to start and a great team activity. Sharing the output on a team call can be insightful and energising for all. Then what do we do about it?

Let's take a common issue we heard which is the blurring of the line between work and home and the negative impacts on the people we live with including our own mental health.

With the absence of traditional demarcations of physically leaving a building, the commute, and the crossing of the home threshold, and despite many excellent tips that have been shared on how to best set ourselves up when working from home, we still feel the impact of blurred boundaries. Boundaries give us a sense of control, an important factor in the fight against anxiety and depression. Lockdown has highlighted the need for us to be even more aware and responsible for our mental health.

The tricky bit can be in communicating our needs to the rest of the team. As a team leader, listening in ways that empower and encourage the taking on of more responsible behaviours and meeting the needs of the work. When we do this, we break the unhelpful and unhealthy addiction to victim or competitive behaviours, and spend more time in our zone together.

A team leader role modeling more empowering behaviours may not be enough. You may need to be more direct about it. For example, invite people to a Walking Meeting - and make sure this is clear on the calendar invite. Dress appropriately for weather, have your shoes and earbuds on ready for a 10 am start. Dogs are welcome :)

At the end of the walk - oops, I mean meeting - ask how was it? Did we achieve our purpose? And how does everyone feel? Relaxed, energised, creative, connected?

Back to the blurred lines of home and work. So what boundaries will work for you? Leaving your ‘office’ at a certain time? How about working across timezones? One of our clients starts her day at 10 am after her morning routine and time with the family, works mostly solo on items and breaks for lunch between 1 - 2 pm. During this time she will weather permitting go for a walk or eat outside. The afternoon is for collaboration and meetings. Where possible - walking meetings. The laptop closes by 7 pm for family time and if required once or twice a week the family knows she may need to go back online to work with colleagues in different timezones. In his book The Seven Day Weekend, CEO Ricardo Semler wrote that we easily stay at the office late for work and yet find it hard to take time off during the week to spend time with our children or loved ones. How we construct our lives comes down to what we feel is important to us - our values and how we bring them alive in a way that creates a full and meaningful life. Time in our zone is ultimately our biggest gift to ourselves and each other.

We know that human willpower and our best intentions are sometimes not enough. Enter systems design. Deliberately engineering human behaviour for a specific outcome in the workplace is not new. Remember how Google designed their lunch queue for ideal social interaction to enhance creativity? How about meeting free Mondays or no meetings in the afternoon to facilitate uninterrupted time for work that required strategic thinking and concentration, an important trigger for flow? Imagine if we could only have a limited amount of screen time (ask your kids!), or limited virtual meeting platform time, or a required 30 minutes break before we could accept a new meeting? Systems synced with our whole person's needs for peak performance.

As we apply ‘safe to try’ to other areas of our business, how can we adopt the same thinking to the ways we work together and in doing so personalise the conditions that put us in our zone performing at our best?