Work-life balance stacks up

Deidre Ross, general manager of Mailshop, restricts her working week to 45 hours.

New Zealand's top managers have developed effective ways to handle their workloads and deal with their stress levels. They have also put into place some key ways to meet the expectations of shareholders, employees and their own families while keeping the corporate ship sailing smoothly along.

Deidre Ross is the general manager of direct mail house, Mailshop, and manages her stress as carefully as she manages the company.

"All jobs have a certain stress level. The triggers might be that you start to feel very tired, you have headaches and you start to fall out of your strict plan of work hours," she says.

"When I see those triggers, I sit back, have a look at my diary and usually I've overbooked myself. Often it's myself that I have to re-evaluate. Then I go back to my fundamentals of how I actually work."

Those fundamentals include some clearly defined patterns of work and personal fitness. One of the most important is time management.

"I have a bit of a policy," says Ross. "I like to manage my stress levels and in doing that, my 'Deidre Ross' policy is to keep to a 45-hour week which I know is quite unheard of with a lot of managers."

Sticking to that 45-hour week is not easy. Mailshop says it is one of the top five mail houses by volume and the largest specialised mail house in New Zealand. Making a mistake on a document is one thing, but the risk of sending it out to 100,000 of your client's potential customers ups the ante and the stress levels.

"I'm on call 24/7 in essence. However, I do delegate a lot of that through our managers."

And that means in order to have family time and, she admits, preserve her marriage, the mobile phone goes off in the evenings.

"I have a very strong time ethic. I like to balance my home time with my work time. I've been married only two years and I don't want to be divorced in a hurry."

But she is always contactable in the event of an emergency. However, she insists on empowering others and delegating authority to them so that they can handle things themselves.

"I'm not into micromanaging. If you're doing that then you're not doing your job correctly," she says.

She also requires her staff to take good care of themselves and not fall into the trap of overworking.

"The workload that goes through when I delegate is even. I don't believe in myself doing 45 hours and somebody else doing 60 hours. It's a very strong policy I have to get good productivity out of staff. It's also good for the culture."

Ross takes regular holidays and encourages others to do the same. She believes that staff wellbeing is important to running a successful business.

"It's important to not blow-out and do 60-hour weeks because everything else just falls by the wayside. If you're a good time manager, you should be able to handle it. If you can't handle it, you've got to start looking back at your own schedules again."

Regular breaks are also key. Ross insists they should be spread throughout the year rather than taken all at the end of the year to preserve your mental health.

"I've had staff come in to me where they walk in my office and they feel quite tired and they don't know what the problem is. They have just had a tough week. We'll give them the day off and say, 'don't come in tomorrow. Go and do something nice for yourself'."

Ross has a PA go through her emails, print them out and sort them from critical to non-critical. She also does not force herself to attend every meeting.

"If you're under stress then there's a reason. You have to start delegating more. Cut down on your meetings or look at the quality meetings you need to go to and maybe delegate the others to somebody else."

When stress levels rise, the mental and physical health of a top manager is especially important. For Ross, keeping fit is a daily routine. She says that the old adage, 'work hard, play hard,' has no room in her life.

"Good health is the key. It's like being an athlete. You keep yourself fine tuned. I go to a nutritionist just to keep on top of my diet and my health. I also believe in a lot of sleep."

Ross loosely keeps a food diary and eats regularly through the day to prevent that 3pm dip in concentration and attentiveness. She exercises frequently to keep her energy levels up and believes in making an example of herself to build team morale.

"No one ever has to hold a meeting by themselves where they're under the spotlight. We do it as a team. We talk about it as a team. We look at the solutions as a team. So they're shared stresses."

The stress may be shared in the office, but when Ross gets home, thing are a little different. With three grown children aged, 18, 21 and 23, demands don't stop when she walks through the door.

"The first thing they ask everyday is, 'what's for dinner, mum? And what time will it be on the table?' They don't say, 'gee mum, are you tired? I'll cook for you'."

For Bryan Crawford, CEO of advertising agency, FCB, dealing with the stress of running a company is as much about attitude as anything.

"When it comes right down to it, mountains at work are really molehills in life,". "I tend to keep a perspective that doesn't take things too seriously. I think you can do that without compromising your commitment and your passion for your work and your professionalism."

FCB's clients include Mitre 10 and Foodstuffs and recently worked on the government's census campaign. Crawford reports to a CIO in Hong Kong and has 75 staff in Auckland and Wellington. But his style is more relaxed. He believes the key to juggling multiple responsibilities comes back to lifestyle management.

"If your diet is good, if you're not living on a rollercoaster of sugar and nicotine and alcohol and all of that stuff and you're reasonably fit, I think you can cope with life's little ups and downs at work a lot better," he explains.

Crawford unwinds by playing sport with his teenage son; going to the gym three to four times a week, reading regularly and playing his grand piano at home.

At work he believes in creating an environment of independence for his staff where he can stay out of the detail.

"Being over their shoulder and constantly in the detail of things really doesn't allow them to use their own talents and it makes them quite dependant on you for the answers when in fact they can come up with the answers nine times out of 10 themselves."

While in the office he spends most of his time at meetings and interacting with people.

"I think most of your day as a CEO is spent leading people and that's a contact sport if you like. It's about conversations and meetings."

In the event that he does become stressed, he takes a few deep breaths, goes for a walk and has some quiet time before deciding on how to handle a particular situation.

As the former CEO of NGC, Crawford also has another tip for managers feeling the strain and not knowing how to handle staff or situations.

"I think experience counts for a lot," he says.

"When you've lived through a situation which might be stressful the first time, you build some confidence coming out of that when you cross that bridge the next time."