Work-Life Balance Profile #19: Julia Elmer
(TL;DR heads-up that this is a long blog post! The following introduction is a brief summary)
Introduction to Julia’s Profile
Julia’s story is one of a full-time working mum of two, who considers herself to have an optimum work-life balance of 50:50.
This hasn’t always been the case for Julia. Finding balance is something that she has battled with throughout her career. Things came to a head when she faced redundancy after working nine years in an organisation that would no longer accommodate her flexible or part-time working needs.
Julia overcame this devastating blow and returned to the workplace, determined to find another job that “matters” to her. She is intent not only on advocating for improved flexible working rights, but on “using her time wisely“, a notion that continually emerged as a theme in her work-life balance story. This includes ensuring that the time she devotes to her career is spent doing something that aligns with her social values.
Julia pursues many interests aside from her family and her job. In this interview, she shares her insights into the role that time management plays in enabling her to do this, alongside a delivery-focussed mindset of concerning herself with what needs to be done without striving for perfection. She also delves into how this is underpinned by a marriage based on a fair and equal split of responsibility and labour.
The article ends with Julia’s take on some of the ways that working parents can find the work-life balance “sweet spot” that she has found, namely:
1. Split the household and childcare responsibilities equally in a partnership
2. Wait until your children are older to start working longer hours
3. Embrace the benefits of remote working
It’s notable that the writing up this blog post has coincided with the tragic death of Dame Deborah James, a teacher, podcaster and campaigner. Dame Deborah’s poignant reflections on the fragility and preciousness of time, resonate strongly.
Julia’s story prompts reflections on how finding the right work-life balance is really about choosing how to spend your time, and making that time “matter“, however – and with whom – you choose to spend it.
Work : Life Balance Ratio
50:50
Julia’s Work-Life Balance Profile
London-based marketing manager Julia, the mother of a teen and a “tween”, has recently returned to full-time working for the first time since her daughters were born. Her job in an NHS Trust comprises two part-time roles: one that she does Monday until Thursday; and the other on Fridays. She agreed to take on this additional day’s work on the condition that she would only work during school term-time. So, when her daughters are on holidays, she has Fridays off.
Julia’s husband also works full-time as a Building Services Manager. He recently changed jobs in pursuit of greater career fulfilment, which required initially taking a salary reduction. As they both earn a similar income, neither one of them is considered the “breadwinner” of the household.
Both she and her husband share the domestic tasks around the house, and they both have lots of separate interests outside work, which they encourage one another to pursue. For Julia, this includes pilates classes and singing with a local choir. For her husband, it’s playing with a band and participating in a regular pub quiz. She takes the opportunity to relax at home when her husband is out by watching box sets or reading. “I couldn’t do everything I do without the support of Ian. I never feel like I’m missing out on things because we make space to do them. We make it work”
Throughout most of her career, Julia has chosen roles that tend to support issues that matter to her; primarily working towards improving people’s health and well-being. She regards it a priority to feel a strong sense of purpose from her job: “If I’m going to spend time away from my family it’s going to have to be for a good reason”.
Regarding her sense of work-life balance, Julia says that she feels she has finally “hit the sweet spot”, having established the “genuine sense of balance” that she has long yearned for by working in a job that aligns with her social values and that she can flex around her family life. “For years I felt like I had to fight for it. And finally, now I have it. It’s a great feeling”.
Having struggled in the past with “mum guilt” and “work guilt”, Julia feels excited for the sense of balance she has worked hard to obtain. She puts it down to “a little bit of luck”, as well as a hard battle fought and won. Working mostly from home since Covid has helped too, as she is able to be there when her daughters return from school without reducing her working hours.
A staunch advocate of improved flexible working rights, Julia is optimistic about the tidal shift in attitudes in the workplace: “I don’t want my children to ever experience being told there is no space for all your values for the sake of working a rigid 9-5. That’s what drives me. We are winning. I believe in what I’m doing”.
One Long Day – An Awakening
Julia sits on her sofa staring at the clock. Not long has passed since her daughters rushed out of the door to go to school. Her eldest has been making her own way to school for some time; now her youngest is also establishing a new independent routine. No school run is one less task on Julia’s to-do list. The day stretches ahead of her.
Not long ago, Fridays were a coveted day of time spent in “mummy mode”; her only day off from paid work. It would be filled with taking her younger daughter to playgroups, to the park, settling her for naps, collecting her older daughter from school and starting the bedtime routine, cleaning the house, meeting up with the odd friend who was also not working, being at home with the children.
Now, with her eldest at secondary school, and her youngest in the last throws of her primary school days, Julia feels imbalanced spending one day a week not working in a job that pays.
A restlessness arises in her; she calculates the potential income she could be earning in these hours; she counts the chores that could quite easily be squeezed in among other things rather than on this one empty day. And she wonders to herself how valid it is that she is not working this fifth day of the week. A sense of guilt creeps in.
“Am I pulling my weight?”, she asks herself, as she watches her husband work a full-time working pattern. “Now that my children are living more independent lives, what is the point of spending one day at home, not earning an income, and doing household chores?”
She feels instinctively that there is more value in her filling this time by working than anything else. To rest or play would be an unnecessary over-indulgence.
So, when an opportunity arises to extend her hours to full-time, Julia hesitatingly accepts. And as time passes, she realises that that it was the best decision she’s made in a long time.
I’m opening this “Work-Life Balance Profile” employing a pinch of creative license. The ‘sofa scene’, as I played it back in my mind after interviewing Julia (remotely by Zoom), did happen. But my imagination got a bit carried away with it, I’ll admit. It’s just that when Julia described this moment sitting on the sofa, in my mind she cut a lonely and deflated figure. Quite different to the energetic, motivated and sociable person on the other side of my lap top screen.
I was struck by her interpretation of this new-found unallocated time as bearing a weight of purposelessness; as though she felt like time was dragging. As a person who habitually packs her days full to the max with a mix of work/life commitments, this description stood in stark contrast.
Julia explained that her compulsion to fill that empty time – which now felt surplus to requirements – with work, went without question.
She told me that the extra money she earns from working full-time goes into a separate kitty, which most recently has helped to pay for a family holiday to Mexico that they wouldn’t have otherwise managed to do. That has much more value to Julia than having a day left to her own devices.
Having interviewed other people who have consciously decided not to fill all their weekday time with work, I was intrigued to understand Julia’s motivation. What was a “no-brainer” for Julia, is a “no-go” for others, who have chosen not to give up their spare time to work. Of course, financial pressures are a consideration. But there are other factors at play too.
Take for example Nadine, who shared her story of stay-at-home motherhood on this blog last year. She described feeling a huge sense of purpose and value in preserving time to herself while her husband and children are out at school or work; time she spends not just caring for the family home, but occupying herself with things that she enjoys and that make her feel good.
Soli Lazarus was similarly unapologetic about taking time for herself. She described it as a form of self-care that energises her to be able to continue serving others.
Michelle Green, who featured on “A Fine Balance – The Podcast” talked about the financial decision that she and her husband consciously took when she gave up her career after having children. Forfeiting her salary meant that she was available to tend to their home and children until they reached young adulthood, something that they all valued more, even if it meant going without some things. Michelle gave the example of making do with “bucket and spade holidays in the UK”, instead of going abroad, which didn’t feel like much of a sacrifice.
Clearly the financial benefits of working full-time are a motivation for Julia. But it seems that a deeper meaning and commitment to work are also at play. “I want to feel like my time is well spent and has a tangible value”, she says. Julia is resolute that family comes first; and she and her husband support one another to fulfil their “self-care” needs out of working hours.
Perhaps there are compromises along the way, but none that seem to trouble Julia, who describes herself as “delivery-focussed” and “ambitious”. Indeed, she appears to manage her time in such a way that she can comfortably accommodate all of her work/life activities.
So her motivation, therefore, stands to reason. I mean, isn’t having the career, the pay cheque, the family and the personal interests that one’s heart desires akin to “having it all“?
And if you can have it all, why wouldn’t you take it?
Fighting for Flex
Julia is on a mission.
Having faced resistance and discrimination for requesting a part-time working arrangement when her children were young, she is fired-up to advocate for changes in the workplace so that conditions are improved for future generations, particularly for working mothers.
Her energy and confidence to forge her own path revealed itself even before Julia entered the workplace. As a schoolgirl, it seemed to Julia that her education was mapped out for her:
“I went to a grammar school which was a bit of a sausage factory; kids were encouraged to all head in the same direction”.
As a promising, bright and engaged pupil, she conformed. However, growing up in a small town in Lincolnshire, she was starry-eyed about the “glitz and glamour” of a career in media.
She says that she always felt a sense of ambition. She moved to London and her early 20s were spent partying four nights a week and indulging in what she describes as “the decadent media lifestyle of the 90s”.
As she matured into her chosen profession, Julia discovered the elements of her work that she both enjoyed, and that gave her a sense of mission and creativity. Her perspective of what she wanted out of life also matured, and she decided to make the career move from media to the charity sector:
“I made an active decision to pick jobs that “mattered” over the “fun” job that had little social value”.
Marketing and fundraising drew her in as a way of getting people to do something for nothing and contribute to causes that matter to her.
Julia and I spent a significant proportion of our conversation discussing the redundancy that Julia experienced following her second period of maternity leave. It’s no surprise that this incident dominates Julia’s reflections of her career history: “My world fell apart when I was made redundant”, she recounted, as she went on to describe the details of being made to feel that she was of no value to the organisation if she couldn’t work full-time.
Throughout her nine years of employment with the organisation, she had shown dedication and delivered results. Yet, an office relocation made the nursery commute near impossible during rigid office hours, and flexing those hours to accommodate those pressures would set a precedent, which her employer was reluctant to concede:
“Get a moped; move house; you don’t have to work here” were amongst the answers given to Julia, before she pursued the formal HR channels to make a flexible working request. Eventually, she was told that it could not be done. And they let her go.
“It really hurt”, Julia says, her voice full of emotion. Without work, she said she felt “lost”. After all the time and effort she had invested in her job, redundancy felt like a brutal rejection, particularly given her conscious decision to devote her career to doing “something that mattered”. Now she was being told that she wasn’t needed:
“It was like being thrown out of a club that I really cared about”, Julia described. She went on to explain that it wasn’t just that the organisation wasn’t willing to bend in order to retain her talent; it was that they were willing to lose her over the sake of a few hours that she was unable to commit to the job. This felt incredibly unjust and discriminative:
“I was so passionate about being there and loved the job so much. It felt as though someone had suddenly taken away something that mattered to me. All I did was go away and have children. They couldn’t see the value that I brought to the organisation; all they saw were the hours I wasn’t willing to give to them. They recognised me up until I couldn’t give them 40 hours a week. That was a real kick”.
Being a full-time stay-at-home-mum was never something that Julia considered for herself. Besides her career ambitions, she felt strongly in favour of the social value of children going to nursery. Yet, primarily, returning to work was essential as her family relied on her and her husband’s joint income. Not going back to work was not an option.
Following the redundancy, Julia struggled with her confidence for a while, but she had the clarity of mind to extract what she could from her severance package, including securing some training to upskill herself for her next career move.
Julia describes herself as a person that likes to “take control”, and said that despite feeling bereft after redundancy, she was self-assured in her capabilities and, with the support of her husband, mustered the confidence and motivation to dust herself off and start looking for work again.
In a similar way to Jhilmil Kishore, who featured on the “Work-Life Balance Profiles” series and podcast talking about job loss, Julia took a practical approach to returning to the workplace. She retrained, she applied to job adverts, networked, and took up offers that seemed to fit the bill. One step at a time, she found a role that satisfied her career ambitions, matched her skillset, aligned with her social values, and enabled her to flex her hours around caring for her daughters.
She was back on track. And felt determined to do what she could to expose the injustice she experienced so that future generations, her daughters included, will never have to go through anything similar.
Julia argues that the more that flexible working is talked about and normalised, the easier things will be for future generations of the workforce. “We need to move away from the notion that getting 40 hours out of an employee equates to getting the best out of them”, she argues.
She wants employers and decision-makers to understand that people want to work flexibly not because they don’t care about their jobs. Doing so requires challenging the archaic perception that if you want to be committed to your family, you can’t do the job:
“I don’t want my children to ever experience being told there is no space for all your values for the sake of working a rigid 9-5. That’s what drives me. We are winning. I believe in what I’m doing”.
What a Waste of Time: Pursuing a Work-Life Balance Through Ruthless Time-Management
Part-time working requires stringent time-management, and there’s nothing Julia can’t stand more at work than unnecessary meetings. She argues that if a team is given clear objectives, managers shouldn’t need to intervene with regular meetings, and let people “get on with their jobs”.
Trust, Julia argues, is the most important quality in a leader. “You should be judged at work not for the number of hours you’re working, but by what you’re delivering”, she preaches. “The number of hours you’re sat at a desk isn’t what’s important; it’s what you bring to the table”.
This is where she feels she was most let down in the past when putting forward flexible working requests.
For Julia, delivering at work means having something tangible to show for her efforts:
“I like to physically see what I’ve done and what it’s brought to the organisation. Like “tada! Here’s a brochure!” Or “here’s a really great ad campaign that has raised X amount of money”.”
Meetings for the sake of it are a waste of time if they don’t serve to deliver, she argues. And she doesn’t tolerate time-wasters gladly. “I’m less of a people pleaser now than I used to be”, she says, which is a trend I’ve observed through all my blog interviews: there is a clear correlation between not being a people-pleaser, and being content with your work-life balance. She explained, with some irritation:
“I find meetings for the sake of meetings so frustrating. If it can’t be said in the time alloted, I’m out of there”.
It seems that being ruthless with her time management at work is fundamental to Julia’s contended work-life balance. It enables Julia to switch off from work, to feel a sense of completion when the working day finishes and allow enough hours after work to care for her family and do the things that bring her joy.
Remote working, precipitated by the pandemic to become normal working practice, has revolutionised her career options too; working mostly from home means that she can be present when her daughters return home from school, without reducing her working hours.
Her delivery-focussed mentality is another key factor that enables Julia to adequately balance her work with other things in life. It involves being pragmatic about completing tasks, which in her case requires not punishing herself by striving for perfection:
“I focus on delivering what’s “good enough”. I don’t have time for perfectionism”.
I’m reminded here of my interview with Katherine Brownstein, who previously featured on this blog. In her interview, Katherine alluded to time management as being a fundamental enabler of her work-life balance. Moreover, she shares Julia’s resistance to perfectionism, demonstrating that identifying what “needs to be done” liberates her from feeling any sense of guilt at leaving work at the door:
“She realises that there is always more that can be done at work – in any job. But she is only committed to doing “what needs to be done”. Superbly organised, she will do what is needed as the need arises; “I can’t leave things hanging, and I don’t ever procrastinate”, she says, talking me through the list of reminders that continually ‘ping up’ on her phone to prompt her activity.”
Extract taken from the blog post: “It Doesn’t Have To Be That Way” – Finding Balance by Setting Precedents: Katherine’s Story – on setting work-life boundaries as a legal professional & sharing the workload in marriage
Whilst these two women clearly bear some similarities in their time-management techniques, it’s interesting to note how distinct their work values are from one another. Katherine described work as being a “means to an end”; whereas Julia describes her career as being an extension of her contribution to society. Julia says:
“If I’m going to spend time away from my family it’s going to have to be for a good reason. I am driven to use my corporate skills to do something good for society. Not making money for other people, but doing my bit with the skillset contribute to a cause that I feel has value; that matters”.
This speaks to a question that I’ve considered for some time (and one day hope to make enough sense of to write up in a blog post of its own!): Is it easier to establish a work-life balance when you aren’t emotionally invested in your job? I suppose the disparity of these two women as examples would indicate that the two things are not mutually exclusive.
In the meantime, it’s worth noting my consistent observation that every person’s work-life balance story is uniquely individual. And however much a person identifies with another person’s story, there is always something to learn from understanding their work-life balance choices, and reflecting on one’s own.
A Work-Life Balance Equilibrium – a Perfect Balance?
I must say I was a bit sceptical when Julia insisted that she perceives her work:life ratio as 50:50. As a full-time employee, working 5 out of 7 days a week, it seemed unfeasible that this was possible.
I challenged Julia on this and she was steadfast that to her, her balance feels equally split between work and life; if anything, it tips more onto the “life” side, but she kept to 50:50 as her answer, explaining: “it only works because work works”.
On reflection, I have again employed some creative license in summarising three pieces of “advice” that Julia might offer as to how she has managed to reach her work-life balance “sweet spot” – in case any readers (particularly working parents) may be inspired to seek such sweetness for themselves:
- Split the household and childcare responsibilities equally in a partnership: As I’ve written before on this blog, power couples come in all shapes and sizes. Julia’s description of how equitably she splits the home and childcare tasks with her husband seems to lighten the load on all those chores that fall on the “life” side of the equation. The fact that they earn more or less equally and both work “office-style 9-5 jobs” (e.g. not shift patterns), may influence this as well.
- Wait until your children are older to start working longer hours: Once children are old and independent enough to take themselves to and from school, as well as manage other tasks independently, a lot of the time burden and pressure on working parents is lifted. This makes full-time working much more manageable than when needing to accommodate rigid nursery and school hours.
- Embrace the benefits of remote working: The impact that Covid has had on normalising remote working has made it possible for Julia to be present for her family without reducing her working hours. She saves time on her commute, can be there to welcome her children home from school and then carry on working; which removes any of the “mum guilt” she used to feel. Nowadays the only guilt she mentioned was for not doing more voluntary work in her spare time.
My final thought on this goes back to a point I made earlier about work-life balance choices being wholly individual and our work:life ratio calculations entirely subjective. For Julia, working full-time is the right balance for her at this point in her life. She is content with her current situation of flexing work around life and life around work. And to her that amounts to 50:50 – a perfect equilibrium.
What I’m curious about more broadly is the implied notion that a 50:50 split is an indication of the perfect balance. Could a 70:30 balance, for example, be the perfect balance for another person? (Another future blog post to draft I think…!).
Julia’s journey to 50:50 has not been smooth-sailing; she has worked hard to graft it and proven resilient to some pretty hefty set-backs.
Julia notes that one her greatest role models is her grandmother, who has recently celebrated her 103rd birthday. Julia admires her work ethic both professionally (“a talented seamstress, she was always working on something and earning money for the household: delivering!”) and at home (“she holds the family together”).
Should Julia be fortunate enough to be graced with her grandmother’s longevity, it is easy to imagine her making the most of that time deliberately – packing everything in as much as possible, working and playing hard in equal measure, devoting time to the people she cares for, and doing what she feels matters.