 Let's get started. This is protecting your work-life balance on a global team. I'm Alana Burke. My pronouns are she, her. I work at Amoezi.io. You can find me on the Drupal Slack at Alana Burke. You can find me on Twitter and Drupal.org at aburk626. And you can also find me on Mastodon. I'm on Faustodon at Alana Burke. We're going to go over a handful of things today. We're going to talk about choosing the right job. We're going to talk about toxic hustle culture and how to change your thinking. We'll talk about remote work and setting your boundaries. We'll go through a little checklist to see if your work-life is unbalanced. And then we'll talk about a couple of ways that you could go about fixing things. So let's talk about choosing the right job. You'll have to start from the beginning, right? So in choosing a job, sit down and establish with yourself what you need. Maybe that's flexibility, remote work, lots of PTO. Maybe it's a specific salary. Take a deep look into the culture of the company that you're interested in. Find out everything you can about them. And especially if you get into the interview process, make sure that you're able to talk to peers. If you're not able to talk to peers, that's probably a red flag. And potential peers are the people who are going to be able to give you the truest and most honest view of what working at that company is going to be like. And of course, throughout the process, ask questions and communicate. If you've established all of these things that you need, your potential employer can't give them to you if you don't ask for them and tell them that that's what you need. There's also a couple of things to consider, like where the company you're working is based out of. One of the great things about remote work is that you can work at a company that's based out of a totally different country. So for example, I work in Amazio, which is originally based out of a European country. Now we have people who work all over the world. But the US has a particularly toxic work culture. But many places in Europe and other places in the world don't. People take their PTO. They're expected to take long vacations. It would be unthinkable to come into work when you're sick. That's ridiculous. They have paid sick time. So if that's something that's really important to you, think about looking at some of the work cultures of companies that come from other places and look at the way that they work and the way that they function. And I think you might be very surprised at how different it can be from the US if you're used to the US work culture, where 10 days of PTO is considered pretty good. So that's one thing to look at. And another thing to look at is, of course, the industry. If you work for maybe a nonprofit or higher ed, you're going to have a much slower-paced work, sometimes due to bureaucracy, sometimes just due to the nature of the work. Then if you work in, say, an agency where you're constantly dealing with billable hours and things like that. So take a look at the actual industry that you're working in, because that can make a big difference. So let's just take a look at some green flags and some red flags when you're looking for a new job. So some red flags are inflexible interviews. If you apply for a job and you get an email back that says, hey, can you meet at five tonight? And you say, hey, I'm sorry, I can't do that. And then they're like, OK, well, thank you for your interest in Company X. That's not great. Companies that have lots of turnover, why are people constantly leaving your company? If it's readily apparent in the interview process that they have long working hours, or if they're upfront about that, well, then they're obviously going to have long working hours and probably worse than what they're telling you. If their pay is stagnant, if they haven't had pay raises, well, they're probably not going to have any anytime soon. Companies that don't follow the rules, companies that do things like treating contractors as employers. Obviously, this can be a gray area. There's things like companies if you get contracted to hire. But start digging in a little bit if you see this kind of thing. When their leadership isn't diverse, when you go in and you look at a company and everyone in the leadership is a cis-straight white guy. Again, this is something to take with a grain of salt. If you have a very small company with very small leadership, it can be a little harder to make it diverse. When you have a huge company, it gets to a point where there's absolutely no excuse and this becomes a glaring red flag. I hate this one so much I wrote it twice. Inflexible, arduous interview process. If they're asking for way too much from you, if they're asking for 10 interviews, hours and hours of interviews, lots of work product, if it gets to the point where they're just trying to get free work out of you, that's a huge red flag. Sometimes you can see it right in the job description when they're asking for rock stars and ninjas and unicorns. You don't want to be a part of that. You don't want to be a part of a company where employees are coming in sick. That's not a good sign, especially when we're still dealing with a pandemic. And finally, I put on this list of companies when there's lots of rumors. Sometimes when there's smoke, there's fire. And if you're constantly hearing rumors about a company and it's something that you're potentially interested in working at, I would take a deeper look and see if you can talk to someone and find out what's behind that. Let's talk about some green flags. If the interview process is upfront and letting you talk to potential peers, that's fantastic. If you see super diverse employees and leadership, also a good sign. Jobs that publish salary ranges upfront, also excellent. If it's very clear that your time is respected, obviously a good interview process is going to take a little bit of time. Generally, one interview doesn't cut it these days. But like I said, we don't want to be having tons and tons of interviews that don't respect your time. If the hiring manager asks you about you and your hobbies and what you like to do and actually seems interested in you as a person, that's generally a good sign that the company cares about its employees as people and wants to know about you and what's important to you and what makes you you. If the job posting is realistic, I think someone just posted in our company Slack earlier a joke about if you want all of these whole things, that's not a full stack developer. That's an IT department. So when you see a job posting that's actually realistic and it's clear that they know what they're looking for, that's a good sign. If there's opportunities within the company for career advancement, when they want to retain their talent, they want to retain their employees, that's a green flag. And when the perks of the company are a bonus and not just an excuse for low pay, when they're just an extra added on thing, also good. So again, these are not an exclusive list, but just some things to try and keep in mind when you're looking for a new job. So here's some statistics. 58% of respondents in one study said that they would not accept a job if they thought that it would negatively affect their work-life balance. And the 33% said that they would rather be unemployed than unhappy in a job. The average person spends about 90,000 hours at work in a lifetime. So make sure you're spending it doing work you like with people whose company that you actually truly enjoy. So let's talk a little bit about hustle culture and changing your thinking. Hustle culture is really, really toxic and unhealthy. So to undo a little bit of that, let's just start out with some affirmations. Your worth is not determined by your productivity. There is no such thing as a real job. All kinds of work are real and valid. Doing nothing is good for your soul. My paycheck does not determine my worth. I will not let society determine what success looks like for me. I can do anything, but I can't do everything. So I don't want to be part of hustle culture. I don't want to overwork myself, but I work on a global team. There's someone in my team who is working pretty much every hour of the day somewhere on the planet. So how do I relax when the rest of my team is working? Manage your expectations of yourself. You deserve to take free time. You deserve to watch Netflix or do nothing. So make sure that you're ending your day when it's scheduled to end, taking your paid time off, taking your sick time. Now your sick time and your paid time off are benefit that you deserve every bit as much as you deserve your salary. You wouldn't let your company just not pay you part of your salary. So make sure that you're taking all of the benefits and every last bit of compensation that you deserve, because it's yours. Be at least as kind to yourself as you are to your coworkers. I used to feel guilty a lot, because my coworkers are working. A lot of my team is in Australia and New Zealand. So just as I'm winding down my day, they're coming online. And I felt really guilty, because I was saying, oh, bye, guys. And my boss is just coming online. But that's silly, because I did all of my work. And they're going to do all of their work. We're just doing it kind of asynchronously. Everyone has a different schedule. And it can take a little bit of time to kind of get that in your head. But if you think of it as you would never want one of your coworkers to feel guilty for not being online because you're online. So treat yourself at least as well as you treat your coworkers. You wouldn't want any of your coworkers to come in sick, because they feel like they have to finish a project. So you shouldn't come in sick when you feel like you have to finish a project. And you certainly wouldn't want any of your coworkers to not take a vacation, because they feel like they have work to do. So that's not something you should ever do, too. So try and think about how you would treat a coworker in this situation, or how you would want them to respond. And then remind yourself that you're someone's coworker. And then that's how you should respond. So a couple of practical tips for unplugging when the workday is over. If you are someone who has a lot of trouble ignoring messages after hours or feels like you have to respond to them, take your work accounts off of your personal devices. Or try and make some rules for yourself. Like, we have a lot of fun Slack channels at our work. So I only let myself check fun Slack channels after hours or reply to them. Anything else, if it's on the weekend, I just save it for Monday. If you are able, have a separate office space, whatever is possible for you. If you're working from home, I know that this can be difficult if you don't have an extra room. But even if it's just a corner, if it's your desk, just that is your office space. That is where you work. And when your day is done, you're out of there. I find that this is super, super helpful. So however you can do this, even if it's just sort of like putting a screen around it, make it your office space and it's nothing else. And have a start and an end time to your day. If you need a way to really delineate, this is when I'm working from home and this is when I am home at home. Say, this is when I start and this is when I end and get up and walk away and your workday is done. I know that when you're, especially when you're new at working from home, it can be really hard to sort of find that division of when am I working from home or when am I just on my computer at my house? So I try to never sit at my desk on my computer if I'm not working. Like I'll take it into the living room, if I just wanna be on the computer doing something. I take it somewhere else to be just out of my office so that I'm not in work mode anymore. And use out of office messages on chat and email to make it very clear when you are and aren't working. I try to use Slack out of office messages as much as I can. Also people are very visual so using an emoji like the red X to indicate that you're not available can make it really clear to your coworkers. Hey, don't message me. I'm not even making you read anything but I'm making it very clear that I'm not here right now. It can also be helpful to use like yellow and green emojis too to say like well you can interrupt me a little bit but only if it's important or hey, I'm totally free to talk right now. You can also consider adding something to your email signature that indicates when you're available to work. So this is in my email signature and it says my work hours may look different than your work hours. Please do not feel obligated to respond outside of your normal working hours. I didn't write this, I don't remember where I got it but what I really love about it is that not only does this say I don't expect you to reply right now, it says don't expect me to reply right away. And I wanna talk through setting, an example of setting sort of a bigger work boundary. So this is something that I think happens a lot and people aren't always sure how to approach things like this. So say that you're frustrated because you're working on a team that always winds up working late on Friday nights because you have a publication deadline but you never get the assets from the art team in time to get your work done by five p.m. because they never get it to you until like 4.45. So they get to go off and have their weekend but then your team has to stay super late to get everything done so it can get published. Well, your team is fed up. So what do you do? You get together, you talk about the problem, you come up with a solution and you present it to your leadership. So your team has gotten together and you've tried to set a very reasonable boundary which is requesting that the art department deliver all of the needed assets by noon Friday at the latest or your team will not be able to deliver by the deadline and will simply have to finish up on Mondays. So this is a really reasonable kind of boundary to set at work and I think sometimes people are afraid of trying to get to this kind of thing and what the, you know, in a reasonable company where you have good leadership, what will probably happen is that someone will talk to the art department and they will say, well, it's very expensive if we have to wait till Monday so you're going to deliver this on time and then hopefully your team will not have to stay late anymore. It also helps to have a group of coworkers together. There's much more power in groups than just one person complaining and we'll talk a little bit more about that at the end. So just emphasizing this again, take your earned paid time off, take your needed sick time. Chronic anxiety and stress can lead to cardiovascular disease. Toxic work culture is deadly. Put yourself first. Even if you love your job like I do, remember your job is a service that you provide for money and you can do it somewhere else. I don't say this to be negative but to remind you that in your universe, your job exists to support you and if that's no longer the case, change things. And especially in the United States where employment is at will, loyalty to a company is often kind of pointless. So make sure that you're watching out for yourself and making sure that you're taking care of number one. It is 100% okay to want to just do your job, put in your 40 hours and enjoy your life. Your job does not have to define you. And I know that I say this as we're all at a conference where we are spending extra time because we are the people who want to do extra stuff. We want to do things outside of that 40 hours a week. So let's just go over a few things that might indicate whether or not your work life is unbalanced. And again, for people like us who want to do more, it can be easy to sort of stray from, I'm doing all this extra stuff that I love to I am overburdened and unbalanced. So ask yourself, are you over committed? Are you always saying yes? Are you answering messages and emails after hours? Do you work during your sick time or your PTO? Do you not take breaks during the day? Or remember you have 90,000 work hours during your life. So take some breaks. Are you not sleeping and maybe even bragging about how little you sleep and how much coffee you drink? Do you not have time for family, hobbies, pets, the things that you find fun that make you you? Are you neglecting your health? So sit down, ask yourself some of these questions and try to evaluate where you are in your work life balance and whether that's working out for you. And if you answered yes to a lot of these questions, you aren't alone. A 2021 survey by The Finery Report found that 83.8% of respondents surveyed across 27 industries found working overtime to be normal occurrence with 69.6% confessing that they regularly work on the weekends. 70% of people saying they regularly work on the weekends. 60.8% of them said that they felt guilty when they don't put extra hours in at work. One respondent spent an average of 100 hours working per week. That's two and a half times a normal working week. And a handful of respondents worked between 75 and 80 hours per week. Given that the widely-assisted benchmark of a full-time job is 40 hours per week, these are some really alarming numbers. So reevaluate your relationship with work. What can we do to change some of these things? Hope is not lost and there are a few things that we can try. First, like we talked about in setting boundaries, we can get together with our coworkers and we can get organized. If you and your coworkers are experiencing the same things, coming together as a group to enact change will be more effective. You can start by organizing informally. Talk to your coworkers, figure out your goals, and present to your leadership. In talking about boundaries, we describe this informal organizational scenario. Team of coworkers gets together and sets a reasonable loop boundary. This is how things usually work out. And if you've picked a good company with a good working culture, generally this is all you wind up having to do. But if things don't work out, unionize. If your issues are serious and your leadership isn't budging, you can organize formally and form a union. It's pretty straightforward. Contact a unionizer or start your own. You have 30% of your coworkers sign union cards and you file a petition. The union wins 50% plus one vote. Now you have a union, congratulations. This is something that if you've been paying attention to news it's becoming much more popular. Starbucks, Amazon, all kinds of places are unionizing. And it doesn't have to just be in response to bad working culture or a bad employer. It's simply a way to give workers a way to talk back and to get more support. In the United States we don't have a lot of support for our workers like many other countries. Simply by having a job you are part of a union that supports you and we just don't have that here. So I think it's great that more unions are popping up and I hope to see more organizing within the tech industry. But if there's something that you're interested in or you can't get support, of course you can start looking for a new job. It's only work. In a study by Zipia it was found that millennials stay at their jobs for about three years. 91% of millennials say that they expect to change jobs every three years. The average tenure for workers between the ages of 25 and 34 is actually about 2.8 years. The study noted that while some millennials are a little older than this range this does reflect a large portion of this generation. The average person holds 12 jobs in their lifetime and let's wrap this up with a few more affirmations. My well-being is my top priority. Today is today, it's not every day. Rest is work too and it's a job that needs to be done. And that's it, we ended a little early there weren't a lot of options for how long your talk could be this year. So if you have any questions I'm happy to go. Here we'll start over here. So the question is if a project's going behind schedule what do you do? Do you protect your time or do you follow along? I think this can really depend on the project and what's going on. Sometimes if it's a client project it simply has to get done because someone else has made promises for you. And I think the way to address that winds up being in like a post-mortem and saying, hey, why wasn't the planning done properly? Where did this go wrong? When did we run out of time? Was it simply assumed that everyone was going to be developing 40 hours a week with no time for meetings or stand-ups or all of the other things that wind up? No one actually develops 40 hours a week. Where was that mistake made? So I think sometimes that's what happens to happen. But also if it's that someone is expecting you to work like 60 hours a week to get this done and you can't do that, I think it's also totally reasonable to push back and say like, hey, look, I know that we have this project deadline, but I can't actually do, we're not going to make this deadline. What is the solution here? What do we need to do? Do we go back to the client and renegotiate the deadline? Do we get some freelancers? And like what is the solution here? So I think it's just, that's the kind of thing that's going to depend on who is the client? What is the project? Where did it go wrong? And also I think it can depend a little bit on like, in terms of where did it go wrong? Like was it more on the client that it went wrong? Then maybe it's more comfortable to push back. Was it more on your team maybe that you ran out of time? Then maybe it's, we try and crunch it and get it done and fix it next time. Yeah, I think it can be hard if you're not seen as a team player when it seems like the team playbook is we're going to work extra hours. I did stop working in agency work because that was something that I didn't want to do and I did find myself in positions where, people were working on the weekends and I was like, I don't, I'm not comfortable working on the weekends and also it wasn't really emergency work either and then I got accused of not being a team player and I was like, well our team doesn't need to work on the weekends and we shouldn't be working on the weekends and that sort of led to me realizing that that wasn't the team for me. So I think, and things like that when everyone else is working and you don't want to work, I think you mentioned like getting extra vacation days, like that's definitely something you could propose is like, can we bargain something? Like can I get some flex time for this? Can I get some time back? Yeah, but I think at the end of the day it's deciding is that the team for you and do you want to use up all of your capital kind of pushing back and saying like, no, I'm not, I'm not going to work. That's definitely, it's a tough one and I think it depends on your situation for sure. I think we have more questions over here. The question is, were those my guinea pigs? I do have many guinea pigs. These were not mine. Most of these pictures were from Fuzzberda but I will admit that I did just pick a couple off the internet that fit my, all right, more questions? If you do a talk like this next year, how do you schedule it before the recruitment chair? I didn't even think of that, but sure. Yeah, that would be a good idea. I have people say the affirmations to you. But I will post these slides. So if you want to have them. Another, have I seen any data about happiness and productivity based on how long you've been with the company? I have not, but I was not looking for those statistics specifically. So I imagine you could find them. Some of these statistics were the ones that the government just puts out every couple of years. Pretty straightforward and boring. But I think especially now, employers are kind of obsessed with the whole like quiet quitting and things. So I think we're gonna be seeing a ton of like surveys and stats about employment and all that kind of stuff. So maybe for my next talk, I will look into it and see what kind of statistics I can find about how long people stay. I also thought the 12 jobs one seemed a little low. And I was trying to figure out where the bones of that survey, because I was wondering if that was just like career jobs or including like everything you've had since you were a teenager, because I'm only like 15 years into my career and I've had like more jobs than that. And I've also stated a couple of jobs more than three years already. So like, where am I? I don't, I don't know. Yeah, I think in the last like couple of decades, it's sort of become the norm that you get any significant pay raise. You have to make some kind of jump to another company. Otherwise you just wind up making sort of like lateral moves, which is a bummer. And we had a hand over here. Yes, role changes within, I think the three years also includes like changing jobs. So like within a company. So that would include like, I spent three years at this position in my company and now I moved to another position within my company. So any other questions that we've got plenty of time to sit here and talk about work-life balance or I can let you have a more balanced day and go do some stuff. You're welcome. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thank you guys.