Blog Home renaissance Foundation-Angela de Miguel

María Ángeles Noguera is the founder of OFA, a Dutch-Spanish consultancy firm, which has been helping families, companies and the public sector to reconcile work and family life for many years. It is a longer interview than usual but we believe it can be of great help to the reader.

Ángela (A): María Ángeles, you are an expert in this field, how would you define work-life balance and what are its benefits?

María Ángeles (MA): I think work-life balance can be defined as the art of being happy. We all agree that combining professional work with housework, children’s schools and caring for the elderly, who are getting older and older, is no easy task.There are daily challenges: meals have to be eaten three times a day, the house has to be tidy and the children in bed on time. Every week there is washing to be done and something to be done to prevent the pile of ironing growing. Weekends, full to overflowing, are no longer a guarantee of rest and family life. It is clear that this is not the life we had dreamed of!

What is clear is that ‘work-life balance’ is here to stay and that the new worker is a ‘task-mixer’. The benefits of work-life balance for the company are important because a ‘happy worker is a worker who works better’.

(A): What have you learnt after all these years advising on the difficult task of work-life balance?

(MA): I have learnt many things, the first of which is how important the Home is in people’s lives. But a Home and a family are not built and consolidated on their own, and we are not always clear about that. When we want to form a family we think in ‘pink mode’ of a husband/wife who will be great, cute, loving, studious children, a beautiful house and a job in which we will be able to fulfil ourselves fully. We have in our heads the ‘superwoman’, beautiful, dynamic, efficient and always happy that the media show us. This is a big mistake because life is not like that and we would avoid many problems if we stopped for a moment and considered that the family is a company that does not build itself. We have to organise, delegate, have priorities, etc.

Sometimes, when I have advised a client to schedule time to be with their partner, they tell me that it sounds very cold, but when I ask them if they regularly make time to be together, they say no. It is not cold to set aside time to be together, it is a necessity and it is important to set it aside in the agenda before others or other needs reserve that time in our day-to-day life.

(A): What are the main problems you encounter in families?

(MA): From my point of view and experience, the main problem is the lack of communication, the postponing the necessary conversations to decide as a couple where we are going and how we are going to carry it out.

(A): What are the obstacles that make it difficult for you to reconcile work and family?

(MA): The conflict between work and family is not only a conflict of the time in which we live, nor is it a conflict of lack of time. It is above all a conflict of values. 

We all want to be ‘task combiners’:

Take care of the family to develop our abilities at work To be able to be creative at work To have a good salary To have free time to Develop personally, Have a social life

We want ‘everything’ and we always go for a ‘10’ in everything!

This has a cost:

• We don’t spend enough time with the children
• We are too tired when we get home
• We have the impression that we are doing everything…half-heartedly
• We don’t have time for our partner
• We cannot take care of our elders as we would like to
• We don’t have time to rest

The consequences of all this are that we are unhappy, often frustrated and both at home and at work there are confrontations and arguments over things that do not deserve it.

More obstacles?

• Not knowing how to say no!
• Avoiding (and therefore accumulating) conflicts instead of solving them for the sake of ‘peace’.
• Taking too much into account the opinion of others
• Feeling obliged to be super-parents, super-partners, super-stupendous… in EVERYTHING.

But who is forcing us to live like this?

Awareness of the difficulty of reconciling work and family life is not the only condition, but it is the first because the solution to the conflict requires a change of mentality that allows a change in the way of living and working. We must dare to think differently in order to live differently.

• Sick leave is often related to the difficulty of being able to have, due to a lack of balance, the private life we had dreamed of.
• Mental absenteeism, because at work people are thinking about the problems they have left unresolved at home.
• Lack of motivation
• Lack of diversity in the company
• Lack of women, especially in certain age groups, who, because they cannot reconcile their private life with their work, reduce or stop working for a while
• Less creativity due to lack of diversity
• Lack of women at higher levels of the company
• Loss of talent
• Difficulties among colleagues, caused by lack of understanding with others who have complicated private circumstances, causing damage to the company’s image and making it unattractive to potential colleagues.

(A): What kind of companies sought your consultancy in this area and what results did you see?

(MA): Amongst others we have worked with Roche Nederland, Deloitte, ABP, DSM, Municipality of Wiechem, Maastricht, Oldenzaal, etc. In companies, we have worked with HR departments with very good results. Our strategy starts by making companies and their staff aware of the need to think differently in order to live and work differently, also at home.

This awareness makes it possible to set goals that allow the implementation of the changes necessary for the creation of a family-friendly culture. Working to be happy is only possible when you are also happy at work! In local councils, we have worked in Human Resources and in projects to reintegrate people into the labour process.

At OFA we have helped our clients to create a corporate culture that makes it easier in everyday practice for employees to ‘Whistle to Work’.

(A): Thank you for this insight into your work and the real wisdom here for all of us looking for the right balance in our lives.

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