Walking the walk: how to make work-life balance more than a buzz word.

• Author: Biton, Adva
• Position: Lessons Learned

Work-life balance is a term that's heard a lot--especially in reference to people with children. Ask any successful working mother, and she'll tell you how often she gets asked about juggling work and life, whether she feels guilty, whether her boss or company is accommodating, etc.

But here's the thing: work-life balance is climbing the ranks of what workers want, whether they have kids or not. And while companies try to become more conscientious about flexibility toward employees with families to consider, they could unintentionally be breeding resentment across their workforce.

It's a situation Rachel Hofstetter, chief marketing officer of Chatbooks, has seen before. In a previous job in New York City, Hofstetter would constantly see people with families packing up and heading home at 5 on the dot, leaving fellow coworkers bristling.

"It became: Who gets to leave? Who has the most pressing reason to leave? Picking up your kid from daycare is always going to trump going to yoga class," says Hofstetter. "That's where things can come to arms. If there's no way to finish working at night, if someone has to stay, it's going to be the person who wants to go to yoga, not the one with a crying kid at daycare. Even if the parent wishes they could stay!"

The solution that Chatbooks has embraced is simple: both people should get to leave. With technological advancements, Hofstetter says, there's no reason the aspiring yogi or the parent should need to miss out on life--provided the job gets done.

Tools for flexibility

These days, there's no reason to believe the job has to get done between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., says Hofstetter. With few exceptions, work should always be able to be flexible enough to let employees have a life.

"You used to have to do work at work and home at home. When you left work, you couldn't actively do work in a connective way, or approve things, or talk. You could e-mail, but you couldn't do collaborative work from home. I think there's a really interesting shift that's happened with Google Docs, DropBox, Slack and the cloud. That's what's happened," she says. "You can quietly dive back in now at 8:30 p.m. after your kids have gone to bed. It's no longer 'someone else has to pick up the slack so it's done.' You can go home and do things with your kids, pick them up, go to your favorite hike or yoga class. You can leave and do that and then come back to your work later at night.... Tech takes away these conflicts."

Chatbooks...