2024-07-22 10:52:05
It determines how you combine your professional and personal life. But it also matters what type of boss you are
“The right person” is a special project of “24 hours” about professional success, career growth, personal development, workplace relations, about good practices of employers, about news from the HR sector and management, about the labor market and vacancies .
Summer, sun, heat, people on vacation, and you work. Even more than usual, because some of your colleagues are on vacation, so you have to take on their duties as well.
Your boss is busy and even calls you at home to discuss something, to assign something. You appreciate his desire to be his right hand, but you never seem to catch a break.
Well, already you can quite legally not pick up the phone on him. In March, the deputies of the last parliament wrote in the Labor Code that the employees have the right not to answer the boss when he calls them during the interday and interweek breaks. Unless otherwise stipulated in their contract, they are always available.
Even if nothing else is planned, your boss will not like that he is looking for you, and you have no greeting, no answer.
But actually here they are intertwined several issues to consider one by onebecause they are important to your career.
The first is with the overload. It is true that during the most vacation time in many companies and institutions it happens like this – whoever is at work also takes over the tasks of their absent colleagues. But in companies and institutions where there are generally few people, it is precisely in this period that it is most clearly evident how crowded they are.
If this is the case on your team, it’s probably a signal to consider whether and how long you can handle being overworked. Not during vacation time, but all the time.
The second question is do you want to take advantage of the situation, in which you are at the moment – the boss is counting on you a lot. If you earn his trust by showing your professional qualities, you can count on receiving dividends in the coming months – a higher salary, a promotion in the hierarchy, some other kind of bonus.
If you want that, don’t suffer from the workload, but try to give your best to impress the boss.
Do you actually want to is the third question, perhaps the most important. At first reading it seems wonderful to get more. But for that you have to pay the corresponding price, and at the moment it is clearly visible – more effort and something like irregular working hours. Which is a dubious privilege.
Here you face the need to assess exactly where you are – what the company is like and what your boss is like.
A good balance between work and free time is one of the criteria by which employees evaluate their employer. It is also believed to be an indicator of corporate social responsibility – processes to be organized so that people do not have to work overtime.
There are rankings by country. Germany, for example, is one of the countries where employees rarely have unforeseen circumstances that require them to work overtime. Germans are among the most satisfied with their work-leisure balance.
All over the civilized world, this balance is increasingly valued, and many companies list it as one of their advantages in recruitment advertisements.
Try to analyze whether you work in such a company. If the answer is yes, then you are among the lucky ones.
In most companies with such a corporate culture, managers follow the rules. But although rare, exceptions do happen – your boss may be a workaholic and/or to act according to his own management style and not care at all about the work-leisure balance of his subordinates.
Career development professionals always emphasize that it is good for professional development if the employee is in harmony with his boss. And with it, understanding how long a person works and what time he works is key.
According to sociologist Christina Nippert-Eng, in this regard, people are divided into two types: segregators and integrators.
Segregators set clear boundaries between work and personal life. Integrators cannot separate the two.
If you are a segregator type, you won’t be able to stand a boss who has a habit of bothering you with business at all times. Your very nature will rebel against this, you will painfully suffer from a sense of imbalance between your professional and personal life.
If you are an integrator type, you might even like the boss’s behavior. But with this harmony, he will get you carried away, and there is an even greater risk of overheating by not stopping to think about work after you get home. The tendency to blur the lines between professional and personal life puts a strain on you because you are unable to achieve psychological detachment. You’re not at work, but it’s still in your head.
You need to learn to draw a healthy line between your professional and personal life if you don’t want to risk your health and your career, which can collapse due to inefficiency and mistakes due to overload. Learn all kinds of techniques to achieve psychological detachment, experts advise.
This is extremely important and if you get along with the boss because he’s the segregator type.
Such a manager gives an extremely bad impression that you do not organize yourself to complete your tasks within the established working hours. It seems to you that he should be satisfied by saying, “I will read the presentation on Sunday with a fresh head after I rest on Saturday, and on Monday I will show it to you”. A to him, this activity of yours and mixing between work and free time seems to him as stupidity or as an inability to cope. You don’t win, you lose points. He’ll probably end up concluding that you don’t fit the corporate (or his) culture.
Once you have a boss segregator, try to develop such an attitude yourself, however difficult it may be because of your character. Separating your professional and personal life will undoubtedly be more beneficial for both your career development and your health.
—– Bulgarian employers – the most civilized in the EU 🙂
According to the official data that appear for Bulgaria in Eurostat, the workers in our country very rarely have to work extra. According to this indicator, our country is in first place among all the countries in the European Union.
In 2023, an average of 7.1 percent of those employed in the countries of the union worked more hours at their main workplace than the established working hours. For Bulgaria, the number is negligible – only 0.4%.
It is negligible compared to the EU average, not to mention Greece, which has the highest share of overtime workers (11.6 per cent), followed by Cyprus (10.4 per cent) and France (10 .1 percent).
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