"Work families" may matter more than you think!
By: Perre L. Shelton
A standard 40-hour-per-week full time job appointment will take up about 25% of a person’s adult life. Combined with getting 6-8 hours of sleep, that means that the time a person spends awake will likely occupy 48-57% of someone’s day. Furthermore, a greater majority of those available hours—not committed to work or school—fall on the weekend, which means that in a full time 40-hour-per-week role, 58-66% of the day is spent away from one’s family or sleep.
This does not include travel to and from work, potentially going to the gym after work or running other errands, the need to work overtime, and those who have multiple jobs causing them to work more than 40 hours per week. Furthermore, it does not include jobs like teachers and other human services professionals who are expected to lesson-plan in order to prepare to have a successful work-day. This, additionally, does not include working professionals who are also students, nor does it include families who may have members that work on weekends. This means that more than half of our adult life could be dedicated to working—which begs the question: How much time do we have to dedicate to our families at home? If we have no family at home, how much time does one have, in that case, to cultivate a love-life, friendships, and other key forms of connectedness outside of work?
The reality is that adult years are one of the hardest times throughout the lifespan to develop close relationships if one does not find them at work or at university. Furthermore, if one does have a family at home, they may not be getting adequate feelings of connection and contact with other human beings given that they do not have these available in the very places where they spend a great majority of their time.
The human relational-self is an important aspect of development that unfolds over time throughout different age-appropriate relationships. Many major psychological theories suggest that one’s relationships are at the center of healthy development and functioning. At the center of a healthy personality are the experiences we have with people throughout our day; the quality and emotional experiences we have in relationship with others form the backbone of our automatic/unconscious thoughts, feelings, and emotional patterns over time. That is to suggest that one’s reality and one’s outlook is only as healthy as one’s opportunity to forge meaningful relationships with others.
That said, one must wonder the extent to which the average American is getting sufficient time with others, and getting sufficient opportunities for meaningful interactions with people whom they feel a personal connection. Since the quality of our relationships can be an indicator of emotional and developmental health, it becomes important to consider the extent to which frayed access to quality relationships is correlated with the Center for Disease Control’s warning that mental health challenges are increasingly more prevalent in the U.S.
Work-families can be seen as a natural outgrowth of the human being’s inherent need to form meaningful and mutually supportive relationships where they spend a great majority of their day. This is not to suggest that work families replace family members at home, nor is this intended to be an invitation to solicit inappropriate workplace connectedness where it is either unwelcome or unsupported by the larger organizational ethos. What this is to say is that cultivating naturally occurring workplace friendships that mirror sororal & fraternal bonds, as well as mentorship opportunities that mirror maternal & paternal bonds, could produce a workplace ecosystem which optimizes the institutions disposition for success.
Share your thoughts on this article below, and SHARE with others!