Work Life balance with Joanne Victoria

Work life balance has become a bit of a buzz word, you hear it all the time. What does it really mean, and how do we know if we have a good work life balance? We are going to dive into quite a bit of that today with Joanne Victoria. There’s a lot of confusion around what work life balance really is, and what it looks like to be balanced. Some people think in terms of balance truly being equal. As if to say that because we spend this much time at work, we are expected to spend a certain amount of time away from work, doing personal endeavors, or with family. It could be ventured to say that work life balance is not something that can be evaluated on a daily or weekly period. Sometimes it would even be difficult to evaluate work life balance on a monthly timeframe. Work life balance is actually something that should be evaluated over a longer amount of time. The type of position that you have in a company, along with your responsibilities, and seasons of the year in which your responsibilities are greatest, should also be taken into account. An example of this would be someone who is an accountant or CPA. The first quarter of the year would most likely be a much busier time than one of the middle quarters of the year, and this is based on a date that the IRS determines that taxes are due. During the first quarter a person holding one of those positions would not get much personal time as they would during other times, and even though they would work long hours and be away from their personal lives, the time away would be made up once they were out of the busy season of business. It would be difficult to determine proper work life balance in the short term. 

It is very important that you’re able to look back and recognize that you’ve spent intentional quality time in all areas of your life. That means your time at work should be quality and intentional, and that also means the time with your family or in your personal life also needs to be intentional with that a lot of quality. The ability to look back after a year and recognize that there is harmony between your work and personal life based on the amount of quality time you have invested in each, is the true definition of work life balance. Most importantly when spending time away from work to focus on your personal life, or away from your personal life to focus on work, it cannot be stressed enough that it needs to be quality and intentional. If time is being spent just to make sure there are even amounts of time for each, then both your business and personal life will suffer. 

On this week’s episode of the Employer Blueprint Podcast we are excited to present Joanne Victoria. Joanne is the CEO of The Joanne Victoria Group, an Author of seven books, the Host of The San • IT Project Podcast, and a Coach to the Telecommunications, Technology, Entertainment, and Mass Media industries. As she is telling her story, one of the things you’ll find most interesting about Joanne, is that she is a woman of the people. Early in her career, after finding her way into management at a Real Estate firm, Joanne was offered a large board room to be used as her office. Joanne wasn’t comfortable with that so she decided to place herself amongst the other employees and used the board room for what she called, Pizza and Champaign Wednesdays. Of those employees, more than 30% went on to manage other real estate companies, and two went on to open their own companies, which says a lot about Joanne and her abilities as a leader. After spending much time managing others, hiring, and developing employees, Joanne decided to leave the Real Estate Industry to venture into a career in Personal Development where she would host her own work shops and seminars. After doing this for others in the real estate industry for a period of time, and after a couple of moves between California and Washington State, Joanne saw an opportunity to help others who were in a different area of business and that is the technology industry. Currently Joanne works with employees and executives to help them acquire a happier life through a better work life balance. To find out more about Joanne, her podcast, blogs, coaching, and books, visit https://askjoannevictoria.com. Thank you for tuning in to this weeks episode of the Employer Blueprint Podcast!