To promote work life balance, build it into your culture from the start. Set clear expectations when you hire, measure results over hours, and give people the freedom to own their schedules. Then model it yourself by defining success in every area of your life and refusing to let any bucket fall to zero.
- Balance has to be woven into the culture. Without that, everything else is band-aids.
- Measure end results, then let people own their schedules.
- Think dynamic equilibrium. Your buckets will swing, and none of them should hit zero.
- Write down what success looks like for your health, wealth, love and happiness, then design your days around it.
What does work life balance really mean?
Work life balance is both a superpower and something that barely exists for many leaders. The term carries a trap, because it suggests every part of your life gets an equal share.
I think of it as a dynamic equilibrium. Your attention will swing back and forth. The goal is to fill the buckets that matter most and avoid taking a zero in any of them.
Balance means filling the buckets that matter most.
Why does work life balance matter for leaders?
Most people fill one bucket, the one hustle culture glamorizes: work, money and grind. I was raised in hustle culture, so I know that DNA well. Yet we don't see a lot of 300 pound millionaires. If you don't have your health, you don't have anything. Over time I learned I can create more by doing less, by being strategic about where my time goes.
My co-host Arturo Gomez has led teams for 25 years. He has seen that companies who figure this out become high performers. As he put it, how do you compete against a group of people who are happy and engaged?
How do leaders promote work life balance on their team?
- Build it into the company's DNA. Make health and relationships outside of work part of your cultural pillars from the beginning.
- Work backwards from the goal. Decide what you are trying to accomplish and what it takes, so success is clearly defined.
- Set expectations when you hire. Share the objectives and the intensity of the company up front, including when a crunch could call for extra days.
- Keep your own pace to yourself. Arturo may tinker with a problem on a Sunday afternoon. He never imposes that on anyone or wears it as a badge of honor.
- Measure results. Trust people to get the job done and let them decide when the work happens.
Should you measure hours or results?
Results. The pandemic showed Arturo that people can be responsible working from home, and that schedule is relative. When a teammate asked to take Friday afternoon off for Cubs opening day, his answer was simple: figure it out, and on Monday morning make sure I have what I asked for. If that means working Sunday afternoon, that is their call.
I run my teams the same way. Work whenever you want, and if something is due Monday, it is done Monday with excellence. Systems and processes put people in a position to succeed. Want to go to the Cubs game? Cool. My metric is end results.
| The question | Hustle culture | Dynamic equilibrium |
|---|---|---|
| What gets measured | Hours worked | End results |
| Long weeks | A badge of honor | A rare exception, explained up front |
| The schedule | Set by the boss | Owned by the teammate |
| The buckets | Work fills them all | Health, wealth, love and happiness each get filled |
How do you set work life balance expectations when hiring?
Candidates often ask what the work week looks like. Arturo calls it a great question and walks through exactly what he expects, including that his teams won't work six days a week unless a real emergency hits. Honest answers early show both sides whether it is a fit, and that transparency helps you attract and retain top talent. Happiness is a function of expectations, so set them right out of the gate.
How do you promote work life balance for yourself?
Write down what success looks like in the buckets that matter most, like health, wealth, love and happiness. Define a great day, week and month, then design your days around them.
An agency in New York once hired me to help its sales team get better at business by being better at life. They were filling only one or two buckets. Of the 11 people in the room, all 11 struggled with finances and 10 struggled with fitness.
The simplest fix is a morning routine. With one, you start the day in control. Without one, you hit snooze, catch a late train and start the day scrambling. That is high performance 101, and it matters for mental health in the workplace too.
This is about sustained excellence in the areas of your life that matter the most.
Rob Cressy, Episode 61
What can employees do to get better work life balance?
Arturo's advice for people in the daily grind is to speak up with suggestions framed as recommendations. Then look at your own output. The people with management looking over their shoulder are often the ones underperforming, so deliver on time and the freedom tends to follow.
Can AI help you promote work life balance?
AI is the clearest path I know to more with less, faster. Let AI draft routine work, keep the judgment human, and give the time back to the buckets that run dry. Go first as the leader with about 20 hours of hands-on practice, and talk openly with your team about where AI is used. Start with AI for leaders.
Do this today
- Write down what success looks like. Cover health, wealth, love and happiness, then design tomorrow around it.
- Take stock and talk about it. Ask your team what success looks like for them, and be transparent about what you expect.
Listen to the episode
Ways to Promote Work Life Balance
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Questions people ask
How can managers promote work life balance?
Set clear expectations when hiring, measure results over hours, let teammates own their schedules, and keep long weeks from becoming a badge of honor. Arturo Gomez builds these into the culture from the start.
Does work life balance mean splitting time equally?
Work and life rarely get equal shares. Rob Cressy calls healthy balance a dynamic equilibrium, where the buckets swing back and forth and none of them drop to zero.
Why does work life balance matter to a company?
Happy, engaged, well-balanced teams produce tremendous output that competitors struggle to match.
How do you ask about work life balance in a job interview?
Ask what a normal work week looks like and what will be expected of you. Good leaders welcome the question, because honest answers show both sides whether the role is a fit.
Full transcript
Episode 61: Ways to Promote Work Life Balance
Welcome to Leadership DNA, a podcast for those who aspire to be a better leader. Alongside Arturo Gomez, I'm Rob Cressy. Today's topic, ways to promote work-life balance for your team. And Arturo, work-life balance is both a superpower as well as something that doesn't exist for many leaders, entrepreneurs and employees. How do you promote this within yourself or how do you think about work-life balance?
I mean listen, I think it's being talked about more so now than it ever has been, right? You've been hearing this theme, this concept over the last, I would say maybe 10 years, maybe even 15 years. I think you start hearing people bringing this up and this becomes a conversation. I think it's harder. There are certain people that are very driven in that find true enjoyment in the hunt of entrepreneurship and in working. Finding pockets of time, even seven days a week where they're churning on something is common I think for a lot of people that are die-hard entrepreneurs that are built to be problem solvers. When people ask me personally what I do on my free time, well I love to spend time with my family, I love to work out but I also love to grind on problems and so it could be Sunday afternoon like I don't find true enjoyment and I like to sit and try to tinker with things and try to find solutions to things. But that's me, right? That's me and so I think when you really dive into what it looks like in the workplace and how to create that culture or that understanding that there is going to be this respect for this work-life balance, I think it starts in the very foundation of when you're building a company in terms of the DNA and the attributes of the company and also really when you're trying to really find, resolve or a solution or a place to what is it that you're really trying to accomplish and what's going to be needed to accomplish that. For me then I'm working backwards and so when I start talking to staff members or when I begin hiring for a specific project or for a specific job, the objectives of what success looks like is very clear.
And so I want to make sure that people understand we're never going to work six days a week. I might personally, I don't ever impose that on anybody. I don't ever make anybody feel guilty. I'm never going to wear that as a badge of honor. Now granted if the sh*t hits the fan and we need to be active and people need to work seven days a week, well that also needs to be clear and transparent on the front end. So when I'm recruiting, when I'm hiring, everybody knows what the objectives and the intensity of the company is going to be. And I let people know that I'm not doing this specifically for my health.
I'm doing this to be a winner. I'm doing this to win and whatever it is that we're doing whether it's this business, this industry or this category. So I make that very clear. And so that to me creates the guardrails, the guardrails of how we're going to operate and what's going to be expected. And so I think the idea that people, the cultural pillars of how what's important to the company should also allow people to feel that there's real value in taking care of your health, that there's real value in having your relationships outside of work. And so I think that's to me where it starts. It has to be woven into the fabric of the actual culture of the company because if not, everything else is bullsh*t and band-aids. 100% there's so many good things that you said that resonate with me and or that I already wrote down in our notes. So I know that we're aligned with.
I'll start with this. I'm doing this to be a winner. So for me, this is about sustained excellence in the areas of your life that matter the most. And for so many people, they fill up one bucket in the world that is glamorized often is work, money and hustle culture. You fill up that you're good. But you know what? We don't see a lot of 300 pound millionaires.
So because of this, you have to think about, well, what is important to being a winner? And for me, you're looking at the holistic nature of what success looks like. And you ever said, you even said the question, what does success look like? Yeah, it's great to be on a yacht with tons of money. But if you don't have your health, you're kind of in trouble there. So for me, and this is straight out of the playbook of what I work with so many leaders and entrepreneurs on to begin with is so many of us are wired for action. Like you, I never stopped thinking about the things that I want to create. But work life balance air quotes is about filling up the other buckets. The fallacy in the term work life balance is that all of this stuff is equal. That is not true. For me, work life balance is more about what I'll call it a dynamic equilibrium. We know things are going to swing back and forth, but not taking zeros in buckets to me as what's important there. And of course we're going to keep going back to health because if you don't have your health, you don't have anything. So for me, that's super important. And really, this just starts with writing down what's important to you. What success look like? What does a great day, a great week, a great month and like you are a tarot, like I'm constantly innovating and creating because this is what I love to do. So this isn't, I was raised in hustle culture. So I've got that DNA in me. And now I'm to the point where I don't relate to it because I understand that there's the perspective that I can actually create more by doing less. It doesn't mean I'm sitting on the couch watching Netflix. It means I'm being strategic about the way that I'm thinking about these things. And I think this is where the nuance of the trap of work life balance comes in that everything needs to be equal. I don't believe in that, but I believe in the ability to fill up the buckets that matter most. And that's what balance looks like. Yeah, yeah. I mean, listen, I think the other thing, so that's, I mean, super valid, super important. And I think when you get back to this metric of the, what does success look like? People need to be held accountable. And, but you also need to be, I think, I think one thing that the pandemic brought is when everybody ran out of the office and when they left the office, I think the world started to realize that, hey, people actually can be responsible working from home. Like we can get things accomplished working out of the office. And so, I think that's, I think for me, one of the things that that's taught me is schedule is relative. And so I have conversations with people all the time that it's like, you know, my staff and teammates and about, hey, can you mind if I do X, Y and Z, but I'll catch up. So I don't, I don't need, you don't need to talk to me specifically about where you're going to be. I trust you just get the job done, just get the job done. And so if for them, the reason that they're asking me to be out of the office on Friday after news because they want to go to the opening day of the Cubs, I don't, I don't give a sh*t.
Like you figure it out and on Monday morning, just make sure I have what I asked you know. And so your determination or your work life balance, your happy factor is you put that back into the employee's hands or teammate's hands and allow them to understand that again, we're a culture of winning. So you got to figure out what that looks like and what that means. And so if you got to work kind of Sunday afternoon because you took Friday off, then that's on you, that you figured out, but if that's part of your balance and part of your happiness, to me it's, it's irrelevant. I don't care. Just make sure that we're all being respectful to the culture and to this idea that we're all committed to doing something significant and we're winning. Yeah. And to me, this is a standard and I operate the exact same way.
Everyone that I work with being someone who has been an entrepreneur for more than a decade, creating my own schedule, doing essentially whatever I want, whenever I want, at the end of the day for me, it's about accountability to the results of the things that we say that we're going to do. I'll give you the freedom to work whenever you want to to do this thing. But if we say this is due on Monday and we're there on Monday, cool. We better be seeing that this is it and it's done with a certain level of excellence. And it's also why I'm so fanatical about systems and processes is to put people in a position to succeed.
Hey, do you have everything? You want to go to the Cubs game? Cool. It's all good with me because my metric is not hours worked. It is end results. Correct. Yeah, 100%. So and listen, I think the companies that have figured out what this looks like are the ones that are high performers because when you have a happy, motivated, well-balanced staff, your output is tremendous. It's tremendous. It is one of those intangibles that's very difficult to compete against. How do you compete against a group of people that are very happy and engaged? It's tough. Yeah, Arturo, I've mentioned this before, but I never set out to become a coach, but I lived like one for more than a decade until I was eventually hired by an agency out in New York to help make their sales team better at business by being better at life. And we knew that they could do the numbers and everything, but it was a very simple thing is they weren't living holistically. They were only filling up one or two buckets of their life. So the first thing that I did when I went in there is I was like, all right, let's take inventory of the 11 of you, how many meditate and nine out of 11 raised their hands? How many of you struggle with finances? 11 out of 11 struggled. How many of you struggle with fitness? 10 out of 11. So I audited the things that are never talked about in a regular business setting and I said, all right guys, let's go and create with this stuff because it's a very simple thing. Imagine how much more productive or happier an employee or a team member would be if they just had a morning routine or some sort of system or organization to boot themselves up to be the high performer so that when they get to work and they start working on that stuff, they're in control of the start of their day as opposed to hitting snooze. Oh my God, I'm late. I'm going to work. Oh my God, the train is running 15 minutes late and now you're scrambling and it's a very simplistic example. But for me, this is high performance 101 for every single person in company. And I've architected this and for anybody who's interested, you can go to builtforthegame.com for the first time ever. I'm giving my personal growth training program that I take my clients through for free for anybody who wants to create this air quotes, work life balance, being better at business by being better at life because these things in Arturo, you and I, we originally connected over this. The way that we start our days, the morning routines, the working out, the high performance as entrepreneurs, this can be very formulaic and you can design this into your life. And when you do, like you said, this is how you create a high performing team. 100%. Yeah, it's all critical. I mean, I think it's foundational. It starts at the top. But I also think I want to leave a little tidbit too for people that aren't necessarily the CEOs or presidents of these organizations and they're just hardworking folks that are in the grind on a daily basis. I think making sure that you're finding opportunities to be vocal and to provide suggestions is a good thing. I think people are sometimes careful in doing that because they don't want to be considered like they're bitching or complaining. You want to make sure that you're in a space where you can give some feedback and some recommendations and do that. And I think it's, but it's also, I think there's an opportunity there for those individuals to also look at their own output and their own performance and say, the people that tend to have quote unquote management looking over their back are the people that potentially aren't necessarily performing at the level that they should oftentimes. And so if you're a high performer and you're putting it out the way that you should and you're doing it on time and there's no issues, then there's no issues. So I think it's extremely valuable. I think that right now society is more so than ever really diving into this.
And I think the pandemic pushes everybody to a point where now it has to be present. It has to be something. It has to be a topic of dialogue, especially when people are coming in and they're interviewing for jobs. These are things that they're asking. I mean, this is, I see it all the time. People are asking what does my work week look like? I said, well, yeah, great question. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about exactly what I'm going to expect from you. And so, and I love flushing that those honesty's out quick because again, you know, it lets everybody know if I'm right for you and you're right for me. And that's a good flushing, you know, process exercise that should happen in any situation to make sure that you're going into the right environment. Yeah. One of my favorite quotes, happiness is a function of expectations. So let's set those expectations right out of the gate. So Arturo time for the action item or takeaway. And for me, I've got a very simple action item. If you haven't done this before, write down what does success look like for you in all areas of your life or what are the most important buckets of your life? The health, the wealth, the love, the happiness, you can define this because once you've defined this, then you can go ahead and start creating and designing your days. And like I said before, if you'd like a roadmap for how you can easily do it, go to built for the game.com sign up. I'll give you access to the way that I take my clients through it. What about you Arturo? Listen, yours was yours was great. I'm going to piggyback on that. I think it's really important, I think for both leaders of organizations and people that are the foundations of these organizations to take stock of what what success and what what's important to them. And you got to be transparent, you got to be vocal. The transparency on the on the leadership side is going to help you attract and retain top talent.
The transparency on the mid, lower to high levels within an organization are just going to bring honest conversation that's important. So those are my recommendations. Yeah. And we're big fans of honest conversation and we would love to hear from you about this episode. How does work life balance operate in your world or with your team? Arturo, working everybody connect with you. Best place to be LinkedIn.
And you can hit me up on Instagram or LinkedIn at Rob Cresci.
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