Bring Work to Life by Bringing Life to Work: A Guide for Leaders and Organizations

by Tracy Brower

Organizations accomplish results when they powerfully engage employees and capture their discretionary time. This is more important than ever during this period where employees are facing unprecedented time poverty. Technology has blurred the lines between employees' work and personal lives, and they are faced with the challenges of successfully navigating and integrating work and personal demands. When organizations provide the right benefits, policies, and cultural practices, they win and they serve employees in the process. Using examples and real-world experiences from senior executives and employees, author Tracy Brower shows readers the importance of work-life supports and how they lead to more engaged and fulfilled employees. Bring Work to Life by Bringing Life to Work is your go-to guide to work-life support, providing easy-to-read strategies for building and implementing your organization's strategies to harness work-life supports, increasing positive impact to your bottom line.

Genres: Leadership

256 pages, Hardcover

Published October 16, 2014

Reviews

[Corey]

Brower advocates for a greater integeration of work and life through work-life supports, a multitude of options companies can offer their employees to work more flexibly and autonomously. Most of her research came from interviewing executives at Fortune 100 or 500 companies.

I found the book uncessarily long, with certain phrases and themes repeated dozens of time. Lengthy quotes pad out the page count without providing much insight. The book contains some funny graphics as well that are often less clear than the text. The funniest is the "70/7 Rule" which, unless I'm missing something, simply means that when you are 70% sure about a decision, it should be right 7 out of 10 times. An illustrating graphic shows the numbers 70 divided by 7 with the 0 and second 7 partially clipped. Huh?

Her research doesn't appear to be that rigorous either; the main points come from anecdotes. The main argument is that work-life supports increase engagement, recruitment, retention, satisfaction, + health, and those in turn drive business efficiency, productivity, and profitiability. I was surprised at the lack of studies drawing a direct line between an implemented work-life support and increased productivity.

I found two themes most useful. First, Brower advocates in thinking in terms of abundance, meaning that leaders should enable employees to do their best, most-meaningful work by finding their passions and providing accomodations to make that work possible. Second, she describes the ways in which women and parents of small children are most likely to encounter spillover between work and life, and that this should be accepted and navigated.

[Vairavel]

This book has some useful info related to how you can handle work-life balance or the lack of it and how companies need to be proactive in embracing technology for optimal utilisation of scarce knowledgeable people resources. Beyond a certain point in the book, almost after a third of the book, the author starts being very repetitive and then the book goes on and on and on. The book could have been more concise and to the point. I wish that all authors respect the reader's time, especially the non-fiction authors who would like to give us great advice.