Make 2022 the year you reclaim your work life balance

In the 14-plus years I have worked as a director at Shipley, I have had the good fortune to meet hundreds of companies across multiple industry sectors and those responsible for their business-winning efforts.

The biggest challenges that most people have shared with me over that time is the stress, long hours and fatigue that comes with the job and how responding to bids month in month out can feel like a relentless struggle. Compromising their enjoyment of work, life in general and even the way they feel about themselves.         

I attended an industry event in Melbourne some years ago where someone was given an award for having worked through two nights on the trot to get a bid out the door.

Can you believe it?

I and many others at this event couldn’t, and it’s stuck in my mind ever since. This sort of behaviour was being celebrated by peers in our own industry, where it should have been pitied or called out for what it really is: a colossal organisational failure in the duty of care to an employee.

In the bidding world, working extended hours in a never-ending cycle is still the norm rather than the exception in many organisations.

Some even view doing so as some badge of honour, which is really rather sad when you think about it.

People have said to me, ‘It's expected, that’s the reality of the world of bidding’. Says who? Why should it be?

Compound this over the past 20 months with the impact of COVID, the endless Teams and Zoom meetings, working across time zones, the isolation from working from home and the uncertainties of the future.

How did it ever get to this?

Time to call it out. Enough, no more. Things need to change.

With the New Year just kicking off, many people are thinking about the year ahead and what they can do to be more successful and happy in what they do.

If that’s on your mind, why don’t you take advantage of this moment to develop a plan for a future filled with more happiness, hope and certainty than last year? But how?

While there is no magic wand to changing an organisation’s approach to business winning and bidding, here are some ideas that I have seen some adopt to progress down that path:

• Track the hours that each member of your business-winning team is working. If that’s 10 hours a day during the working week and time spent on weekends, Houston, you have a problem. These sorts of hours are unsustainable. No one can do their finest work when completely fatigued.
• If the hours argument doesn’t work in helping you drive change, put a cost to the time your business winning team is investing in winning opportunities. An hourly rate to each member of the team with some overhead component. Show your CFO the investment you are making on bids if you aren’t already capturing this, particularly for those bids that you have lost. Stand back as you watch your CFO’s eyes open wide in surprise and, more likely, horror. This is typically the lightning rod where the change begins, with senior management buying in for doing so.
• No bid the opportunities where you don’t know the customer. Our global research shows that by the time a bid comes to market, in the vast majority of cases, the Government agency or corporate entity has already made an emotional decision about who they will buy from. The RFT exercise proves that their decision was right and encourages as many other suppliers as possible to bid. Helping them drive down the price on their preferred supplier.

As industry peers let’s make a conscious effort in 2022 to prosecute the case more than ever before that organisations need to look after the welfare of their work winning teams and that the ‘old school’ mantra of working round the clock is just not going to be expected or tolerated any more.

The status quo has to change.

         
If your organisation does not want to embrace this way of thinking or does ‘lip service’ to it, it’s probably a good time to consciously acknowledge this reality and consider whether staying with your current employer is the right thing to do for you and your family.

There are companies out there that offer a far more supportive, collegiate-style working environment. We know this because we work with many of them.

Good business-winning people are becoming more and more in demand, too.

An old boss of mine told me many years before I joined Shipley, ‘Coombsy son, the last thing you are going to say on your death bed is geez, I wish I had put more time in at work’.

Keep that thought, as it has helped inform and guide my journey in life.

Recharge, reflect on the year that’s past, your successes, all the good things that have happened, and the not-so-good things, too.

Make some notes about what you want to change in 2022 to make your life happier and help you achieve a better work-life balance, even if that includes changing your job or career path.

You deserve it.

Go well.