Employee Work/Life Balance and Margin Principles

How many hours should employees work? Servant leaders must answer this profound and essential question for themselves and for their employees. The answer is neither a static nor a moving balance, but a shifting and dynamic harmony among our key life domains. These include the following elements: 1. Performing our work with excellence as broadly defined (efficient and effective, mission enhancing, ethical, moral, and treating others by the Golden Rule) 2. Providing sufficient time and energy for our other life domain obligations (family, church, community, etc.) 3. Providing sufficient time for self-care (relationship building, sleep, nutrition, exercise, recreation, etc.) Returning to our original question, how many hours should employees work? The conventional standard is the forty-hour, five-day workweek. However, is the forty-hour workweek a moral imperative? Clearly it is not when we expand the scope of our focus and discover that the forty-hour workweek is a relatively recent twentieth-century practice. The Judeo-Christian religious tradition embraced the six-day workweek, but did not state a specific number of hours. Today’s jobs and occupations vary in their effort and time demands.