 all civil engineering professionals struggle at some point in their careers with work life balance. It's a stressful job with complex projects. But in this episode of the civil engineering podcast, we were happy to talk to Ken Micah, a civil engineer from Green Bay, Wisconsin, who is a leading civil engineer in his firm. But he has been able to maintain a very good work life balance throughout his career. And in this episode, he's going to share how he was able to do that. Let's jump right in. All right, now I'd like to welcome on our guest for today's episode, Ken Micah. Ken is a project engineer and office leader for GeoSyntax Green Bay, Wisconsin office. Ken, welcome to the civil engineering podcast. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. So, Ken, before we dive into the topic of work life balance, which is one that I think civil engineers are always interested in learning more about, tell me a little bit about what you do on a day-to-day basis as a civil engineer. On a day-to-day basis, it can be a combination of things. I work on projects that are all over the United States. So I could be communicating with different individuals, both internally and externally to my firm. At one point of my time here, I was working on a project in Georgia and also in Seattle, Washington at the same time. So definitely stretching the United States. Besides that, I also am in charge of leading this Green Bay office. We're tasked with helping to bring in new work. So a lot of business development, marketing. We just opened up in Green Bay within the last two years. And so we're still trying to get our name out there as a firm that can be used by a lot of the local private and public groups. They're looking for assistance and then also recruiting as well. So definitely bouncing around with different hands throughout the day, just trying to accomplish my many different tasks that I'm going on, both externally for external clients, internal for clients, and then growing the office. That's great. So what kind of services, like more specifically, do you guys offer? So Geosyntec provides a breath of services, whether it's a geotechnical, specialty geotechnical work, especially environmental work. My area of expertise is in site remediation, brownfield redevelopment, as well as in-situ stabilization, certification, and contaminated sediments. But then we also have team members that work in water resources, advanced manufacturing, industrial wastewater, and a few other areas. That's great. So multi-disciplinary company, which I think has a lot of benefits to it, especially when you're doing business development, you kind of have more to offer and you can kind of cross-market a little bit. So with that, let's jump into the topic that we asked Ken to come on and speak about, which is work-life balance. And I know that over the past six to nine months, everyone has had different experiences, depending on where they might be located in terms of how much they've worked at home, how much they've worked remotely, if their kids have been home with them, and there's all types of things that have been going on. But generally speaking, Ken, I think a good place to start with this is just thinking about what work-life balance means to someone. So how do you think of work-life balance, or how do you define it? So my definition of work-life balance is trying to balance the needs both of the business opportunity that you're in, so your job, and then also your family. And I never see that balance as being 50-50. As a professional, I don't see the general 40-hour work weeks as being the standard. But I also see that we need to, there's our weeks as a professional engineer, where you need to put in maybe 50, maybe 60 hours. It really depends on the deliverables, what your internal and external clients need. And so trying to balance that with also what your family and your personal life needs. For me, I have three young children and a wife, and so I need to also be available to them and making sure that I'm there for them on their special occasions and their accomplishments. And so trying to work that balance across both groups is a challenge, but if you do it appropriately, you can be very successful. Yeah, that's great. And I agree that it's really dependent on one's needs in both areas, and that can change, of course, over time for everybody. I have three kids as well, and they're starting to get older now. And I find that there may be less needy from me, and so that might change things a little bit. I know there was another engineer that I have been working with once who had a definition of work-life balance being how many nights he was able to come home and have dinner with his family. So I think there's different ways to think about it. I also think that the world of civil engineering, your jobs in the civil engineering world, can complicate things a little bit for multiple reasons. One of them, they're very demanding. Project sites don't necessarily stop at 5pm. Some engineers work on sites all night. And even like my wife is a civil engineer and she has a government job, and some people think that that's just easier. You work a shorter number, typically shorter hours or less hours than people in private consulting, but then you go home and everything is great, but she still has projects that are stressful and she thinks about them at home. It's not like turn on and turn off the switch. So I think it's different for everybody, which is why it is really important to create some kind of working definition that you kind of revisit from time to time. So all that being said, a lot of civil engineering professionals need to travel for work maybe less as of recently with the pandemic, but typically you got to go to project sites, you got to travel, you got conferences. Even with a schedule like that, how are you still able, how can one still incorporate kind of work life balance into a schedule like that? Well, that usually gets a little bit more difficult, especially if you start getting involved in the nonprofit organizations, the professional groups, ASC for example, and others. It can get difficult, but trying to find a way to make it all work and make it fun for everyone is definitely beneficial. So in the past for just traveling alone, early on my career, I spent the first two years on the road and where I was down in Florida, and that's when I was dating my wife and I would have her come down every couple of weeks to visit or I'd come back to Wisconsin to visit her. And so we tried to make it work where we were bouncing back and forth as much as we could. Fortunately, when you fly that much, you do have a lot of points to fly, so that is a nice benefit there. But then I had other projects in other parts of the Midwest and so it worked out a lot easier earlier on to have her come visit me on the weekends or a couple of days during the week when I was a lot closer. With the children, there's been times where I've actually said, hey, why don't you guys come with? We're going to our larger metropolitan area where there's things to do and it's a little bit of vacation for the kids. And then at the end of the night, when I'm done working, I can help you out with the kids just like we're at home. And so just get a hotel that's more of a suite set up so it's got enough space for everyone to be comfortable, but then to have it where it's got local amenities as well so that kids in the family can treat it like a vacation while I have to go to work, but then it's a vacation for all of us after I get out of work. That's great. Yeah. And again, it sounds like it's just about being flexible in terms of what's going on in your life, what needs you might have, what resources you have available to you to be able to make it work. And really at the end of the day, it's up to you as the working professional to make decisions on if you want to take a job like that. Knowing going in that you have three young kids or whatever your situation may be, but you're going to be traveling a lot. So that's something that you're going to got to talk to your spouse about and your family and certainly be prepared to do that. Another question, Ken, or topic I guess to dive into a little bit is I think maybe being clear and transparent and communicating with your supervisor if there's important dates that are up ahead in the future where you want to take off, do you find that planning ahead of time can be helpful with the balance? Yes, that's spot on right there. A lot of the times what I try to do is set boundaries on when I will be taken off for my family, for birthdays or big milestones or accomplishments coming up and just saying, hey, this is when I need to take off or at least at a minimum, be in the area and not be traveling. But I do try to take off for those days so we can do something special as the family and then try to put it, if I have to put in an extra hours, put in extra hours before then or after then if there's a deliverable that really needs to be done right at that moment. But usually playing ahead, giving a couple weeks notice to project teams and that is definitely key to making sure that you're not trying to take off while everybody else is scrambling, trying to set yourself up for success and not setting yourself and your teams for failures for last minute decisions. Yeah, I think that's really important, especially in a world of project deadlines where people are up against the wall a lot and trying to get plans and specs done. If there's something that you're aware of, that's why it's good to do planning like that, six months out, a year out depending on, sometimes you know your vacations a year in advance and getting all that on the calendar and communicating that to your supervisor. It could be really important in these project deadlines, stressful type jobs and I think too, just in general, like in talking to a lot of executives in the civil world or managers or department managers or office managers, I think a big thing that they're always interested in is the reliability of their team, right? Like how reliable is someone and I feel like if you have communicated to them ahead of time, you have something going on, you're going to need to be off and flexible as opposed to just not one day giving them a week's notice or not showing up at a critical deadline. It certainly speaks to your reputation and your team members are saying, geez, where's Anthony going? We've got this big project as opposed to if you had clearly communicated that ahead of time. So I think that's really important. I would agree. And then the other thing too, what I've noticed that supervisors and leaders in the firm will really appreciate is if you can delegate some of that work to somebody that's below you on their career path so that you can actually, especially on the consulting side, keep the costs down for doing the work, but then also start also help bring and train people up because I've noticed that there's a lot of times where engineers like to do more of the work themselves to be in more control, but we still need to delegate down as much as possible. And usually when you can delegate down, that just does a lot much more for just your career, but also another person's career as well and trying to bring them along. So trying to work that into your work-life balance actually can pay off. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. In fact, we have an entire course at EMI that we teach on delegation for engineers because like you say, Ken, it's not easy because we start off our careers in the details and then all of a sudden one day we're expected to get rid of the details and give them to someone else, which isn't always natural or comfortable. But I do tell people that all the time, if you're really struggling with your time management, productivity or work-life balance, you should take a look at all the tasks you're working on and see if there's any that you can kind of shed to other people. If it makes sense and if you have someone available to help you with that. And that being said, kind of going into the next topic here is I know that you like to really pay attention to your kind of your daily tasks and your productivity to help you with work-life balance. Talk a little bit about kind of task management and how it relates to work life balance. So for task management, I like to, if I, depending on the morning, I try to do it at least once a once a day, but if not at a minimal once per week, look at all my tasks and I know that are coming and determine what's urgent, what's not urgent, what's important, what's not important. And trying to divvy up, you know, how I'm going to address that day. So on the consulting side, you know, time is money. And so you're trying to bill, you got to bill as many hours as you can. And so just trying to take care of billable work right off the bat in that day. And then starting to see, okay, so this has to be done right away for this client, and that has to be done right away for that client because they're both urgent and important. But then the next thing is looking at, okay, what's important, but not urgent. You know, can I schedule that type of work? Doesn't I need to get scheduled for today? Can I get scheduled for two days from now? When is the deadline for that type of work? And then looking at what's urgent, but not as important. Just trying to see where I can actually delegate that or I should say important, but not urgent, see where I can delegate that type of workout. And if something's not important and not urgent, then just not doing it because if we don't need, it doesn't need to get done. And it's not very important. And usually that's stuff where Sam falling up on a lead and the lead's not going anywhere. Maybe I'll move that task to not important, not urgent for that time being. And then it might come back later and start having a traction again, say the permitting process on it is moving slow. And so it's not going to get better anytime soon. Okay, that's fine. We'll put it off this side. Now that when it comes back around, we can move it, if we get a deadline, we can put it whether it's urgent or not urgent and important and not important. So things can get moved around all the time, but just trying to focus on, you know, what task is most important at that moment and most urgent at that time and just trying to balance them out and move things around as needed. I do that both for daily tasks. And then I've started doing that as well for on the business development side and going after projects because if a project's not moving, you know, I'm not going to spend time on it or a proposal's not coming out soon. I'm not going to spend time doing my research on it. I'm going to worry about more important tasks at that moment. And then slowly bring it back in as soon as it becomes more important. So I started trying to track things out on a zero, three months, three to six months and greater than six months because just making sure that I keep it in the forefront of my mind and to keep an eye on it. And sometimes things move up and down depending on their importance there as well. But at least it helps me try to manage and schedule where I need to be looking at for different opportunities. Yeah, that's great. I like that a lot. And it reminds me of, you know, one of my favorite quotes from Peter Drucker, which is efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. And I think that as engineers, we always want to be efficient. We always want to be doing stuff and checking off a list. But sometimes we forget to prioritize these things, which is kind of like Ken walked us through. And I do a very similar process. I use something called the 8020 chart, very similar. It's got, you know, high impact, low effort, high impact, high effort, similar ideas. And it's really helpful in making sure I focus on the high impact tasks. And what I find with work life balance, which I think is really important to note in this part of our conversation is a lot of times like people create their own stress, like in their heads about like, this is really important. I got to get this done. But if you step back and you have some kind of process for filtering the tasks, as you just suggested, you might realize that it's really not that important. It could go next week and you won't even notice the difference. And so I think it's really important to give yourself a process for that because you might just be creating your own stress when you don't really need to. I would totally agree with that. And even just trying to take time off and a lot of individuals don't like to take time off because like, I got emails coming in left and right. And I look at half the emails coming in and I ask myself, does this need to get replied to right away? Or can we just wait on it and let it go? And, you know, a lot of times most emails, if you let them go a day or two and don't need to jump on them right away, the situation takes care of itself. Because a lot of times we tend to start using email as our way to correspond with each other instead of picking up the phone. And a lot of times, you know, we tend to lose some information through emails. And so it's even just better just to pick up the phone. And so I try to have a rule for myself as well that is this before I send the email out, is this going to cause what I would call spam to that individual, you know, because is this going to make more work for me and that individual, you know, how are we using this medium to communicate? And that also helps to with work life balance by trying to limit the amount of emails that I'm sending out and bring it back onto myself. Yeah, that's great. And I think the kind of the key takeaway there for everyone is just, you know, be really kind of aggressive in terms of filtering out or prioritizing what you have on your plate. Because you may realize that, you know, only half of it's important and half of it can wait or half of it can get delegated or half of it can go away. And that will reduce your stress levels. And that will effectively help work life balance. And it really is really just a function of making sure you're focused on the right thing. So I think that that's something that's really worth, really worth considering. Can another thing I know that you're a big proponent of is when you're working on a big project and you've completed the project, you know, allowing some downtime or some ability like recovery time afterwards, can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so if I see like a big proposal, a big project coming up. And I know that the RP or the deliverables do by a certain date. I'll look at what the next week or so is going to look like to see if, okay, do I need to, do I have a lot going on that finally turn up? Otherwise, I'll take a day or two off just to decompress and spend more time with the family just because I've probably just put in a lot of late nights. And so it's just trying to remind them that, yes, I still care about them. Yes, I'm still here. And so just trying to look at that out. Sometimes it doesn't work out where it might be like two or three weeks later, or if the deliverable deadline changes and gets pushed a week or two, or the RFP gets response gets pushed a week or two, then I'll try to adjust as much as possible. But just trying to factor that in it does help a lot with, you know, just mental clarity. Yeah, that's great. And again, it stems back to planning. I mean, if you're looking ahead at things like that and you're planning accordingly, it's going to allow you to try to create more of that balance because you're going to know that you would have already accounted for, you know, that week after when you maybe you're feeling burned out, you're going to recover, you're going to recruit, you're going to spend some time with your family, and then you get back into your flow of things. So it is, it is, I think work life balance or any kind of balance in your life is definitely contingent upon planning and thinking ahead, for sure. So let's talk a little bit about how kind of establishing a good reputation, or maybe, you know, what people think of you in terms of a professional can help you in terms of your work life balance. So I would just say the first step is to always come through and you know, somebody's expecting something from you, always try to give, you know, 100% on that and also meet the deadline and come in under cost. If you're not going to be able to meet the deadline or you're seeing yourself going to be going over the total cost, communicate right away. Communication is key because people don't enjoy surprises, especially those types of surprises. So just try to communicate upfront as much as possible. The other thing is, especially early on in your career, when you're still trying to get your footing in your company and in your career in general, be up for anything. There's been numerous occasions where I was like, I don't know if I'm going to enjoy this assignment, but I still took it and I actually really enjoyed it. And now I'm looking for more and more of those types of projects because it's actually an area that I really enjoy. So being open to different opportunities and different projects is key. Also, if you're being asked to, say, travel to a site last minute on a Sunday, where you're going to lose your Sunday and be in the field all week, unless there's a real big reason why you can't do it because of something or if it's just more of an inconvenience, I'd say just deal with the inconvenience and go because that might be a huge opportunity that you'd miss out on. And those are the types of opportunities that people like to see from younger engineers because eventually, as you, and this is where you're at geosynthetic, we talk about working with your internal clients. As you keep working with your internal clients and you keep helping them out, they'll keep providing you more work and helping you all stay busy. And so that's where you build up those relationships and you become depending on how that relation builds as their go-to person. And as you continue to build that as the go-to person and your career keeps progressing, that's how you start moving out of the field because if you're getting years of experience, your billing rate goes up and a client doesn't want to pay that much money for you to sit in the field full-time. And so that's a good way to work yourself more into the office to get more responsibilities and to make that reputation. Yeah, I think this is a really important point. I mean, I think your reputation that you build in your career is kind of like you're building up credit with people, like for example, your supervisor. So if you're always working hard, you're there, you're delivering, one day you can't be there, you have something that you've scheduled with your family, they're going to be totally cool with that because they know that when you're here, you're 100 miles an hour, you're getting everything done, you do everything that they need and you're delivering. On the flip side, if you're not dependable or reliable, kind of like we talked about before and you do something like that, it's going to be like, oh, just another time that he's not here, he's not available or whatever the case may be and you're building up, not a good reputation for yourself. And that is really important. And the internal client thing is a really good thing too. For those of you not maybe familiar with the term, I know I worked for a multidisciplinary civil firm. So when that happens, you do have what's kind of called internal clients. So if I have a geotechnical department and they have to produce a report from me, even though we're in the same company, they essentially got to produce something for me. I'm like an internal client to them and that again builds their reputation. If they tell me that they're going to get the report to me by Friday and I tell the client I'm going to turn it around for them and I don't get it, they're kind of failing me. And then again, that affects like how I look at them and that affects, I think kind of like the credit or the reputation, the credibility that you have with people. And I think that that is important, especially when you want to have other benefits like being able to take off and like be able to be a little flexible. I know for me, I made an effort to be very reliable. And then when I went to graduate school, I was able to ask my supervisor, could I leave early one day every week for the semester so I could take two classes and not have to go two nights a week and we were able to work something out. So I do think that that is that is very, very important. And really, I think all of these points, you know, you can go through these of course, and kind of extract the ones that will be, you know, most helpful for you. And Ken, it sounds like just from our conversation and some of the talking points that we went through beforehand, it's just important that like work-life balance, you know, needs to be on your mind at all times to help you to maintain it. Would you kind of agree about that? I would definitely agree with that and just not thinking about how it relates. You know, early on in your career, you might not, you might have less responsibilities, both at work and at home, but thinking about how those responsibilities will play into the future. You know, if you're early in your career and you don't have a family yet, understanding, hey, well, if I don't have a family yet right now, maybe I could put a little bit more time in to help myself in the future to give, which will help my work-life balance then. Because, you know, what you do now, what you do currently does eventually play out to where you will be in the future. And so I'm definitely a true believer in that. And then as you continue to make your reputation, you know, it is a lot easier to take your time off or have a flexible work schedule, you know, pre-COVID. It was, you know, now COVID, flexible work schedules are pretty much the norm because of parents having to do work at home while having their kids learn virtually at home. But prior to that, you know, you had to demonstrate at most firms that you could handle a flexible schedule. And by doing that, you had to show that you would still be able to get your work done on time and still meet all your requirements as an employee of the firm and also be available for correspondence, whether by cell phone or email. And so eventually we will be back to some normal sees that were pre-COVID. And so, you know, eventually then we'll probably see a little bit less of the work-life balance or say the flexible work schedule, but we'll still need to maintain that work-life balance. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I think what Ken said there a moment ago is a really important thing to highlight, which is, you know, basically everything that you do in your career adds up, right? So the stuff you do right when you graduate is going to help you in 20 years in some way shape or form. I have a 14-year-old daughter who was in high school and, you know, during the pandemic, she was kind of getting bored and she's like, you know what? I think I want to learn sign language. So I don't know, I signed her up for a course online. She took it. She did great. She's taken the second level. And I told her, like, all these things you're doing, you're going to build a resume, you're going to go to college and all this stuff matters. And so I always think that that's an important thing for people to think about is that everything that you're doing your career can be leveraged in some way shape or form later, whether it's just from the skills you learned from it or from the reputation or the resume or whatever the case may be. So I do think that's important. So we're going to jump into our next segment here in a moment and put Ken on the civil engineering hot seat to wrap it up. But I just want to kind of recap this quickly, our talk on work-life balance. I think the big thing here was flexibility and really paying attention to the needs of yourself, your career and your family. You kind of have to look at all of them because they change throughout the course of your life and your career for whatever reason, whether you're in the middle of a pandemic and you have to be home with your kids or you're going to grad school or you're getting married or whatever the case may be, they're constantly going to change. So work-life balance is really a different thing for every individual. But it is something that you kind of need to have a focus on and kind of be flexible to throughout your career. And if you do that and you plan ahead, there are certainly ways that as Ken talked about that you'll be able to keep it going throughout your career, depending on your situation. So with that stick around with us, we're going to come back in a minute and we're going to put Ken on the hot seat. All right, we're back with Ken Micah, civil engineer. Ken's out in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and we talked a lot about work-life balance. And now it's time to put Ken on the civil engineering hot seat. Ken, you ready? Yes. All right, first question. Are there any specific rituals that you practice every day? For example, do you have a specific morning routine, lunchtime routine, something that you do consistently on a daily basis that contributes to your success? I would say I get up at the exact same time every morning. You usually get up at four o'clock and that stems back to high school, going to early morning high school hockey practices. We had to be on the ice at 4.30. But since I still can't sleep past four o'clock since then, before COVID, I had to go to the gym every day for an hour and a half, two hours, go work out. Now because of COVID, staying away from the gym and trying to keep myself and my family healthy. And so I've been doing a lot more running yoga and cardio, or meditation, excuse me. And so doing the combination of those three have definitely helped me start my day with a clear mind and ready to open up my email box every morning and see, 23 emails that trying to figure out need to get addressed. So it's nice to do that workout or exercise, whatever you do to help take care of yourself. And that's how I'm able to come on in and not start panicking when I see all those emails every morning. That's great. All right, next question. What is one book that you might recommend to engineers or just one book in general that you found to be helpful in your personal or professional development? I would say, I can't remember the author, but it's Who Moved My Cheese. And the only reason I say that one is I found that whether it's engineers or people in general, we don't like change. And that book really helps you look at, if there's a change coming, what the different options are and what you could be missing based on the way you interpret that change. And so kind of like I was saying earlier, if you're going to, you're asked to do something different that you probably wouldn't like, try it anyways, because you don't know where it's going to take you. And that's been a huge thing. There's been several times in my career where I wasn't liking something. And I didn't think I was going to like it. And I decided just to try it anyways. And it's actually taken to me where I am now in my career. Wow, that's great. Yeah, Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson. It's a great book. And I think you can read the book in like an hour or an hour and a half. It's a short read. But it is powerful. So that's a good one. All right, next question. Thinking back on your managers in your career, Ken, and you don't have to name names, but just in general, if you think about some of your favorite managers or your favorite manager, what made them your favorite? There's been a couple of managers that I can think of. And the traits that they all showed was the openness to listening and just digesting first and not jumping to conclusions, conclusions right off the bat. And then walking through the, you know, the conversations that we were having, and them either saying, yeah, you know, that sounds great. Or, well, what if you would, what if you thought about this? Or what if you thought about that? So they were the type that allowed you that, you know, either reinforced you, or they would ask you questions when they wanted you to learn something. And instead of just telling you what you should have done, it was asking you to figure out almost on your own, even though they were asking the right questions to help you figure it out on your own. So it was almost, so, you know, a lot of people don't like being told what to do. The way that they were able to tell you what to do through asking questions was very powerful. That's great. I mean, one of these days, we got to pull the stats on this, but I think like of that question, we've had 150 or so episodes, I think that listening comes up like a ton of times, you know, my manager listened to me, my favorite manager really listened. And so that there's definitely something there when you hear that many people say that, you know, how important that is to, to, you know, working professionals to be heard, essentially. So it's good to hear you say that. All right, Ken, we've got one last question for you. We called the civil engineering career elevator advice question. If you got into an elevator with a civil engineer and you had about 30 to 40 seconds with him or her and had to give him or her career advice in that short period of time, what would you say to them? I would say early on your career, just put your time in because it pays off in the long run. There'll be long weeks, long days, but, you know, it's, it pays off. I remember we were first several years of my career. I was working six days a week on a construction site, 12, 14 hour days. And I could tell you that I couldn't really tell you the last time I've had that in, you know, over consecutive weeks, you know, every once in a while it'll get a 60 hour or 70 hour week, but those are few and far between. So getting your work in now early on in your career will pay off for later on when it matters most, when you have a partner and a family. Yeah, that's great. And again, that goes back to kind of what Ken's kind of running team in this episode, which is, you know, planning ahead, building your credit, building your reputation, building your credibility, all these things can help you to have more freedom and flexibility later on in your career. But it really starts, you know, from the beginning. And that's something that you really need to be aware of. And if you're at the beginning of your career, great. If you're not, you know, you should share maybe that lesson with some of the people that you work with or some of the, you know, the interns or the younger professionals in your firm, because I think you'll, you'll really help them if you share that message with them. Well, Ken, listen, it was great to have you on. I'm really glad you took some time out of your day to help and to share some wisdom on work-life balance, which is something that's really important, especially in today's world, to all CE professionals. And just thanks so much for taking the time. No, thank you. I greatly appreciate being on the podcast today. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Civil Engineering Podcast on YouTube produced by the Engineering Management Institute. We're always looking for new ways to help engineers become effective managers and leaders. You can view all of our content on our website at engineeringmanagementinstitute.org, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here for our weekly videos. Until next time, please continue to engineer your own success.