Our community is slowly but surely coming to terms with the new reality of life under quarantine, and with shelter-in-place orders (here in Minnesota, at least) extending to the beginning of May at the very earliest, we’ll only need to continue to adapt, compensate, and adjust. While many businesses are unfortunately completely closed and many workers furloughed (or worse), a lot of us are continuing to work, just from home. Work-from-home can require a lot of acclimation, and it can be especially impactful for family businesses. Business families have to put significant work into maintaining proper work/home boundaries under the best of circumstances, and with those two settings being pressed together even further, tensions can rise quickly and problems can easily bubble to the surface.
Before you go any further, now is the time for a family meeting. We’ve talked at length in the past about the importance of family meetings for maintaining the health of business families--they help get feelings out into the open, establish expectations for behavior and boundaries between business and home life. Whether you have them regularly or are just learning about them, now is the time to set one up. If your family lives separately, set up a video or phone call to discuss how the business will operate remotely, as well as how your family can stay connected. A regular family meeting can be split into time to discuss business and time to talk about your personal lives (no work talk allowed), or you can hold separate “meetings” for each!
Don’t Let Your Comfortable Home Become a Pressure Chamber
If multiple members of your family business live together (whether it be a spousal team, a multi-generational household, or some other living arrangement), things can become even more complicated. The obvious benefit is that by sheltering-in-place together, it can be much easier to stay connected and stave off the aggressive loneliness that permeates us during these difficult times. However, the already-blurred boundaries between work and home life can become completely shattered when all parties have to work from home, and this takes serious special consideration. Below are a few tips for helping keep your hard-built structures from falling apart completely under such odd circumstances:
Some of these suggestions are seriously difficult to maintain even during “normal” life circumstances as people who own and work in family businesses. We know how hard it can be to leave work talk at the office, or to not be always available via email or phone, or to work 15 hour days. But this unprecedented situation forces us all to examine how we live and how we work, and we need to accept that maintaining family health is a high-priority business goal. We all need to push and/or restrain our behaviors in certain ways to meet this goal, whether it means reminding your business partner that we don’t “talk shop” at the dinner table, reminding a client that you aren’t available to chat after 6 pm, or respecting that your employees need weekends, even if they’re working from home. For advice on building and maintaining boundaries as a business family, consider reading The Soul of the Family Business by Tom Hubler. Through personal anecdotes, real-world case studies, useful tools and frameworks, and more, Hubler offers an in-depth look at how the most successful business families operate their businesses and build their personal relationships in healthy, productive ways. You can pick up The Soul of the Family Business, available in hardcover form on Amazon.com, directly through Itasca Books, or at a bookstore near you. And of course, if you’re ready to take the next steps, you can always contact Hubler for Business Families today.
- Designate a home office (if you don’t have one already). If you have one room in your house that you can set aside as a home office, do it. The more you can use it exclusively as a home office (not doubling as a tv room/exercise room/etc), the better. What you want is to have a dedicated space for work where if you enter it, you know that you’re working. Taking this a step further, set up a family rule where work talk happens in the office--if you leave the office, you leave the business discussions there just like you would if you were still leaving the house to go to work. If you don’t have the space for a dedicated home office, find a way to set aside part of your house for work during work hours, even if it’s just the dining room table.
- Hold yourself to work hours. Set a work schedule for yourself, and stick to it. One benefit of working from home is that you don’t necessarily need to hold a typical 9-5 schedule, but whatever hours you set for your workday, you need to do your best to honor. If the whole family can decide on similar hours, this will help tremendously with keeping work and family time separate and keeping your boundaries intact and functional.
- Communicate, Communicate, and (over) Communicate. Now is not the time to let minor annoyances fester into unspoken resentment. While you don’t want to fall into the trap of nit-picking as a way of venting your frustration, if you have concerns about the way others are behaving, you don’t want to let that slide in a time when removing yourself from a situation simply isn’t realistic. Nor is it the time to hold unvoiced expectations of others: If you don’t let them know where they stand and how you’re expecting them to behave, the people you work/live/eat/breathe with will only disappoint you, which is not healthy for maintaining these relationships.
Some of these suggestions are seriously difficult to maintain even during “normal” life circumstances as people who own and work in family businesses. We know how hard it can be to leave work talk at the office, or to not be always available via email or phone, or to work 15 hour days. But this unprecedented situation forces us all to examine how we live and how we work, and we need to accept that maintaining family health is a high-priority business goal. We all need to push and/or restrain our behaviors in certain ways to meet this goal, whether it means reminding your business partner that we don’t “talk shop” at the dinner table, reminding a client that you aren’t available to chat after 6 pm, or respecting that your employees need weekends, even if they’re working from home. For advice on building and maintaining boundaries as a business family, consider reading The Soul of the Family Business by Tom Hubler. Through personal anecdotes, real-world case studies, useful tools and frameworks, and more, Hubler offers an in-depth look at how the most successful business families operate their businesses and build their personal relationships in healthy, productive ways. You can pick up The Soul of the Family Business, available in hardcover form on Amazon.com, directly through Itasca Books, or at a bookstore near you. And of course, if you’re ready to take the next steps, you can always contact Hubler for Business Families today.
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