Work-life balance is becoming increasingly important as the quality of life becomes more and more important to candidates. For skilled employees, a high salary is not the only focus anymore — many companies are competing to offer that. Candidates now strongly consider what their lives will look like if they take up that high-paying job. Therefore, for big tech companies like Facebook, work-life balance is an essential factor. In this article, we’ll discuss work-life balance at Facebook in more detail.
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In this article, we’ll discuss:
- What Are Some Good Work-Life Balance Factors?
- How Does Work-life Balance Look Like at Facebook?
- How Does Facebook Promote Work-Life Balance?
- What Do Facebook Employees Say About Work-Life Balance?
- What Is the Happy Employee Rate/Percentage at Facebook?
- How Can a Facebook Software Engineer Improve Work-Life Balance?
- The Secrets of Work-Life Balance for a Software Engineer
- FAQs
What Are Some Good Work-Life Balance Factors?
Some important work-life balance factors include:
- Work culture
- Boundary setting skills
- Time management skills
- Interpersonal relationships
- Sleep routine
- Diet and exercise
- The physical, mental, emotional, and financial health of the employee and their closest personal connections
How Does Work-life Balance Look Like at Facebook?
For any company as big as Facebook, work-life balance can vary significantly based on the team. That said, let us look at some of the things we know about work-life balance at Facebook:
Facebook Work Culture:
- Socialization is encouraged in the workplace and helps employees wind down during breaks.
- Employees are mission-driven, goal-oriented, and focused on moving ahead.
- There’s a flat or horizontal organizational structure.
- Being comfortable with ambiguity and changes is important.
- Employees get more opportunities to make decisions, but that also means taking on more responsibilities.
- Projects are fast-paced.
Working hours:
- Could be somewhere between 8 to 12 hours a day, depending on the team and employee.
Flexibility and opportunity for working remotely:
- Facebook has opened up remote work to all levels across Facebook. Anyone who can do their job remotely can request full-time remote work.
- For those who plan to work from the office, there’s still flexibility of working remotely as long as they spend at least half their time in the office.
How Does Facebook Promote Work-Life Balance?
In summary, here are some specific things that Facebook does to promote work-life balance:
- Tools and perks are given to boost productivity, morale, and concentration at work.
- Encouraged socialization at work to avoid fatigue.
- Opportunity to work remotely for all who can do their job fully remotely.
- Flexibility for those who choose to work from the office.
What Do Facebook Employees Say About Work-Life Balance?
Facebook’s Employees say that:
- Facebook is a fast-paced big tech company where things move quickly. Employees are brilliant and motivated.
- Work-life balance can be a pro or a con depending on the team, as in many big tech companies.
- Learning to adapt quickly can lead to a reasonable work-life balance and fast growth for more employees.
What Is the Happy Employee Rate/Percentage at Facebook?
As per the 2016 reports of a payscale survey that included 33,500 tech professionals:
- 96% of the Facebook workers were extremely happy with their work and reported about 44% stress.
As of September 2021:
- Facebook has an overall rating of 4.0/5.0 and a 3.6/5.0 score on work-life balance in Glassdoor.
- When it comes to work-life balance, Facebook has 63% of its employees satisfied with their work-life balance, and 1856 employees rated the work-life balance as C, as per the data on Comparably.
How Can a Facebook Software Engineer Improve Work-Life Balance?
Other than specific secrets mentioned earlier, creating certain habits, inculcating certain qualities, and developing some skills can help improve work-life balance for Software Engineers. Some of them are:
- Discipline and routine
- Diet and exercise
- Creating and maintaining boundaries
- Taking care of one’s physical and mental health
- Regularly investing in the health of close personal relationships
- Learning conflict resolution skills
- Listening to your body and taking breaks when needed
In the following section, we offer some very specific tips to help you work on each of these areas.
The Secrets of Work-Life Balance For a Software Engineer
Discipline is the price you must be willing to pay for increased work-life balance and freedom. Here are some secrets of work-life balance for a Software Engineer:
During work:
- Create a to-do list every day.
- While working, take small 5-minute breaks every hour or so.
- Plan the next day the night before, and check meetings you have the next day while you do that.
- Do the two most difficult tasks for the day before lunch, before the end of the first half of the work-day.
- If a task takes less than 5 minutes, finish it immediately.
- Have a good posture to avoid unnecessary early fatigue and back pain.
- Consider blue light filters for the screen or blue light filtering glasses, which may help with eye strain or fatigue during long working hours.
Outside of work:
- Consider doing meditation or mindfulness for clarity, focus, and peacefulness. Consistent practice will teach you to notice soon and bring back attention when you get distracted from work or procrastinate.
- Do something you’re passionate about or like on weekends.
- Do not change your sleeping routine on weekends because it will spill over and cost you on your weekdays. Besides, getting early on the weekend gives you more free hours; utilizing them well will mean additional mental health benefits for you.
- Every week, get overall at least one and a half hours of moderate aerobic activity or one hour and fifteen minutes of vigorous aerobic activity, or some combination of that. Spread out the exercise days, and have some rest days, which are just as important.
- To ensure you stick to your sleep routine, wind down early in the evening, have light and early dinner, and avoid caffeinated beverages after 2 PM. Eating healthy and at regular times helps as well.
- Engage in some other activities and form habits that you notice experientially make you more productive. A focus on increased productivity, physical and mental health will do more for work-life balance than almost anything else.
FAQs on Work-life Balance
Question 1: What causes employees to compromise work-life balance for career growth willingly?
There’s a fear of lagging in your career if everyone else is working overtime to increase their output, leading more and more people to push themselves further. Growth and competition can be a healthy part of corporate life and profitable for everyone involved, but only till they don’t come at the cost of burnout and persistent instability.
Question 2: What do companies think about work-life balance?
Most companies understand that while there are crunch periods every once in a while in every growth-oriented company, a lack of work-life balance is not sustainable long-term and will burn out employees instead of nurturing them. It will also drive away highly skilled employees to companies that also offer a good quality of life.
Everyone’s personal best progressively gets better if they lead a healthy, balanced life. Reputable companies and managers understand that companies need to encourage work-life balance to attract highly skilled professionals who are productive long-term.
Question 3: What is the pathway to achieving work-life balance in an environment where most peers and leaders willingly compromise it for career growth?
Here are some things you can do in such a situation to help your work-life balance:
- Try your own ways, as mentioned earlier, to help balance your work and life.
- If the culture is indeed the bottleneck, consider if communicating this issue might be the right move here in the company’s long-term interests.
- If that does not work out, consider if that is the right team for you, where you can increasingly contribute your best long term, and where your best gets better over time.
- And finally, it’s difficult to consistently deliver more and more, even for career growth, if you’re becoming increasingly exhausted. If the company-wide culture isn’t offering the work-life balance you need, consider if that company is the right fit for your long-term career growth.
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