Balance Is A Myth

By Mike Thibideau, President & CEO of Invest Hamilton County

A few weeks ago I took some time off with my family. Somewhere around the second afternoon, I caught myself reaching for my phone to check email. Nothing was on fire … it was just habit. I put the phone back down, and I’ll be honest, it was harder than it should have been.

We spend a lot of time chasing work-life balance, as if it’s a personality trait, as if some people are simply better at it than the rest of us. I want to be honest about where I’ve landed on that. I’m not sure I believe in balance at all. Balance makes it sound like there’s a perfect, level equilibrium you’re supposed to hold every single day, and that has never matched my experience of work or of life. Life ebbs and flows. Some seasons ask far more of us than others, and they’re supposed to.

What I do believe in is wellness, and that’s a different thing. Wellness isn’t about holding everything level. It’s about having what you need to ride the waves without going under, and to recover when a hard season finally lets up. You can’t will that into existence any more than you can will yourself calm in a storm. You build it, mostly out of the conditions around you.

That matters more than ever in Hamilton County right now. At 2.2% unemployment, there is almost no slack left in our labor market. Every person who burns out and walks away is someone the local economy can’t easily replace. For years we’ve poured our energy into attracting and developing talent. The next job is holding onto the good people we already have.

And we shouldn’t assume a high-income, high-achieving county is somehow immune. We rank among the healthiest large counties in America for mental wellbeing, and even so, behavioral-health crisis contacts here have tripled since 2017. We can be a county that’s doing well and still be a county that’s quietly running its people thin.

So what can we actually build? This summer I want to point to two pieces of that work, because they come at the same problem from opposite ends.

The first is childcare. We tend to treat childcare as a family matter, but it lands on the employer’s books whether they see it or not. About 28% of parents who leave a job point to childcare as a reason, and replacing them can cost anywhere from half to more than twice their salary. Our team built a childcare dashboard that lets a Hamilton County employer run their own numbers and see what childcare support would cost them, and what it would save them. For a working parent, wellness isn’t abstract. It’s whether they can get to work on Tuesday.

The second is the manager. Almost all of us have worked for someone who made the job heavier than it needed to be, and for someone who made a hard job feel doable. The difference usually isn’t talent. It’s training. Roughly 60% of managers have never had a single hour of formal leadership development. We take our best people, hand them a team, and then expect them to figure out feedback, accountability, and conflict on their own. This spring we launched the Manager Development Lab with the Tobias Leadership Center at IU, a small, hands-on program built for exactly those managers. It’s a pilot, and we’re starting small on purpose, because we believe the research. The relationship a person has with their manager is one of the biggest factors in whether they stay, and in how they feel while they’re here.

Four years ago I wrote in one of these notes that supervisors should be equipped to truly be coaches, to help their people “swing their own swing.” The Manager Development Lab is that idea, finally built.

Childcare and management might look like they have nothing to do with each other, but they’re really two parts of the same idea. One makes it possible for someone to keep working. The other makes them want to. That’s what workforce sustainability means to me. It isn’t a poster in the break room. It’s the everyday conditions that let good people weather the ebbs and flows and still be here for the long haul.

So this July, two invitations. To our employers: wellness is not the soft part of workforce strategy. In a 2.2% market, it may be the whole thing, and we have tools to help you build it. And to everyone reading, myself very much included, put the phone down for an afternoon. Rest isn’t the reward you get after the work is done. For the people we’re counting on to power this county, it’s part of how the work gets done at all.

If your organization wants help building either piece, childcare or management, reach out. That’s what we’re here for.

— Mike