From ‘Work Mode’ to ‘Home Mode’: Patterns in Conscious Living 3

Those who have created a healthy work-life balance seem to be ‘at home’ wherever they are, in the marketplace, online, at work, at the dinner table or at a family function. Unfortunately, the goal of ‘being at home in the workplace’ may have the negative effect of conflating two different worlds. Studies also suggest that a blurring of work and family roles is associated with lower levels of psychological well-being and marital satisfaction. Individuals may expect family to feel or to operate like work or expect work to feel and look like family. This may result is significant social and emotional confusion, notably when work is a family business and the boundaries are easily crossed. It can be helpful to keep in mind the purpose and nature of work and realize that these are not the purpose and nature of family-life.

There is a phenomenon is modern business that seems to many like forcing a square peg into a round whole. That phenomenon is non-financial reporting. Non-financial reporting (NFR) takes into consideration, for example, a company’s sustainability practices, anti-corruption policies and protection of the human rights of its workers and stakeholders. To those who customarily think of business in terms of the maximization of profit, NFR is indeed a square peg. There is, the traditionalist argues, only one bottom line; while advocates for the new approach looks to a triple bottom line encompassing profits, people and the planet. Those in each camp interpret the meaning of business differently. They appeal to diverse criteria in assessing the truth of a company’s actual performance. And they each place a different value on possible changes in practice and policies, that is, what would count as a good thing.

Intuitively, we might expect that those who gravitate toward the ideals and ways of thinking of NFR are the same whether at work or at home and would have an easier time transitioning from work to home. After all, if at work one’s mindset is oriented toward others as people, and not simple as parts of a corporate machine, then the adjustment to a family mindset is not such a large leap. However, there lurks even in the business-oriented mindset of the non-financial reporter a foundational difference in conscious living than is needed at home.

At the heart of NFR is still a business-oriented criterion of what counts as a good thing -- principally assets that explain a company’s market capitalization, its future profitability and contribution to the industry or to the local or global economy in which it operates. The criterion of value remains the same as in financial reporting. It is a pragmatic criterion. What counts as good is what works. Consequently, all individuals regardless of their roles in modern economic living are expected to think about goodness and success in terms of outcomes, from paychecks to ROI, to churn, to carbon-costs. They are also expected to, and are socialized to, feel deeply the importance of these goals and the factors leading to them. Finally, in a data-driven economy directed by opaque algorithms the best NFR improvements in human work amount to a rear-guard actions.

NFP is a much-needed humanization of modern industry. Like the patterns of sociality in parts of the country that subsume retail shopping under into the wider social goals of general friendliness, NFP understands that business is a human activity. But it does not alter the fundamental fact that the human activity involved is business and not friendship at its highest level. It contains a self-referential orientation that is opposed to the orientation adopted between truly intimate friends and loved ones. Such friendship that puts the utility, enjoyment and well-being of the other first, invites sacrifices that business associates, partners and customers could hardly be expected to make.

The transition to homelife is a shift out of this exclusively pragmatic mode of conscious living and into one that involves a kaleidoscope of mindsets and values. Often what counts as good in the interactions among family members is not what works but what is beautiful. The refrigerator in many homes is a gallery dedicated to the value of creative endeavors that win no prizes and earn no lesser accolades than parental love. What counts a good is time spent (quality time) that serves no utilitarian purpose. The worlds of work and home are distinct not simply because of the rules and roles that constitute each, but because of what the members cherish, because of the patterns of feelings and emotions that are expected and appropriate, and because of the values the define each world as a unique sphere of human living.