'Dual-Centric' Workers May Be Happiest

Nov. 10 -- Has technology helped blur the distinction between your work and personal life? Are office e-mail, beepers, Blackberries and conference calls woven into your time at home?

If so, your home life may be the worse for it. But a recent study finds that things don't have to be that way.

The study found a new type of worker it calls "dual-centric": someone who puts equal focus on work and home and is less stressed, healthier, feeling happier at home, and more successful at work than work-centric colleagues.

‘Balance,’ Then and Now

The old belief about balance, says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, implied a zero sum game, in which you must take away from one part of your life in order to give to the other.

But the study of about 1,200 senior executives at multinational companies, which FWI conducted earlier this year with Catalyst, a non-profit research organization, and the Boston College Center for Work & Family, found that nearly a third of them were dual-centric.

Dual-centrics have three common traits. They can compartmentalize, they take breaks, and they tend to have multiple interests.

Compartmentalizing, or drawing boundaries, is essential today, according to Janis Keyser, a Santa Cruz, Calif., expert in parenting and child development and co-author of Becoming the Parent You Want to Be,, because of the increasingly porous boundaries between work and personal life.

But dual-centrics can draw boundaries — and hold to them. They might work long hours some of the time (although they work five hours per week less than their work-centric brethren), but when home, they live fully in that world.

Lori Queisser, vice president and chief compliance officer with Eli Lilly and Co. in Indianapolis, is typical in that she won't look at e-mail or work until after her three children are in bed.

She thrives on her varied schedule. If she's worried about getting a child to piano lessons or dance class, that undermines her work on a project and vice versa, she says.