Work-life balance, the loose principle through which you evenly split your time and focus between work and personal activities, benefits individuals and corporations in equal measure.
A healthy work-life balance can improve health, productivity, job retention and turnover, and in-turn stave off emotional burnout, say experienced CIOs. And yet, attaining a healthy equilibrium between personal life and career work has seemed further out of reach than ever.
The economic and social fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has afforded CIOs more opportunity and accountability in the boardroom, and put additional pressure on project delivery teams to expedite multiyear digital transformation programs. Business expectations for IT teams have subsequently blossomed, but this in itself represents something of a double-edged sword.
Like many technology executives, Jason James, CIO at US-based EHR (electronic health records) software provider NetHealth, says that he threw himself into work at the start of the pandemic, "in retrospect … because it was one of the few things we could control." He admits that work became an outlet, but an unsustainable one.
“I was working through lunch, working nights, and weekends and sleeping way less than I should,” he says. “My family wasn’t getting the attention they deserved. I may have been succeeding as a CIO, but I wasn’t the top of my game as a father or husband.”
James developed a plan to make work more balanced, setting boundaries for checking emails and messages, and making time for lunch breaks to get outside. But it was still difficult to switch off, with work often eating into family time.
For Tariq Khan, CDIO (chief digital information officer) at the London Borough of Camden, work-life balance came to mean something else entirely. Starting his first CIO job last year, Khan had to juggle work and home-schooling children during the country’s national lockdown, meeting new colleagues virtually and standing up government services with limited resources.
“[It] could have been better,” he admits. “It's been a steep learning curve, plus there has been a lot of reactive demand on local government services during the pandemic which has added to the workload.”
Other CIOs expressed difficulties in working in isolation, pointing to the lack of human contact, the transactional nature of videoconferencing and yet the same pressure to lead, motivate and support teams as well as an ecosystem of partners.
For some, fighting the itch to do more has been difficult, even during downtime. Michelle Kearns was new in her role when she joined Boots Ireland as head of IT last year, having previously spent 16 years at family doctor service Caredoc, most recently as its CIO. She admits it has been challenging to balance making an impression in a new job, while retaining some resemblance of normality at home.
“Even when I was on annual leave this year, because I was so new to the company, we had a project that was going and I was dialling in for calls at the end of the evening to see how it was going,” says Kearns. “It was partly because I was so new, but I also wanted the project to succeed. I think it can be quite difficult to disconnect.”
This disconnection came more abruptly for Oxford Said Business School CIO Mark Bramwell, when a heart attack last May forced him to evaluate life’s priorities.
