How To Fix Work-Life Balance: A Systems-First Approach Companies Need

Forbes

13-05-2025

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A recent episode of Steve Bartlett's podcast, "The Diary of a CEO," sparked fierce debate across social media. The guest was Emma Grede, CEO of Good American and founding partner of the billion-dollar shapewear company, Skims. She said:
"Work-life balance is your problem. It isn't your employer's responsibility."
The clip went viral, with TikTok views topping two million, LinkedIn timelines flooded with reminders of why balance matters, and Reddit threads dissecting every word.
But this viral moment exposes a deeper failure in how we think about work: We're stuck in an endless debate about who's responsible for balance while missing the real problem: poorly designed organizational systems.
The truth is, work-life balance isn't about responsibility. It's about clarity. When organizations build clear systems and set clear expectations, employees can make clear decisions and boundaries.
Vague scope, urgency, and outcomes lead to assumptions; an underground playbook takes hold, and the rift between companies and their people turns into a full-blown chasm of misunderstandings, burnout, and stalled deliverables.
Want to see the difference between clear and unclear systems in action? Here's what happens in two different organizations:
It's Monday, 6:30 p.m. Lilly, the VP of Product, wraps up her day and drafts a Slack update for Liz, a project manager on her team. Liz is responsible for pulling together Thursday's all-company presentation on the latest product launch. Rather than fire it off immediately (it's 8:30 p.m. in Liz's time zone), Lilly tags it FYI (one of five team-agreed tags), adds a note to review it in their next 1-on-1, and schedules the message for 8:00 a.m. Liz's time.
Meanwhile, Liz is catching up with her parents, who are visiting from out of town. Her phone is on, but she doesn't hear any pings because there are none. She enjoys an uninterrupted family dinner.
At 8:05 Tuesday morning, Liz logs on, coffee in hand, and reads Lilly's Slack message. She adds a comment and the link to their shared 1-on-1 doc for discussion that afternoon. By then, she will have a few drafts for Liz to review. There is no adrenaline rush, no after-hours scramble, just clear information.
That's dual ownership in action: leaders leading with clarity; employees executing with agency.
Unfortunately, that's not the reality in most companies. Without clear systems, a different pattern emerges that damages both work quality and team trust.
It's Monday, 6:30 p.m. Lilly, exhausted, scans her "before-I-log-off" list. The executive team has asked for one more slide in Thursday's all-company deck, so she fires off a Slack to Liz with no tag, context, or delay-send. She closes her laptop for the night since she is having dinner with the executive team.
Meanwhile, Liz's phone buzzes at 8:35 p.m., right after they ordered dessert. One glance at the message from her boss and her stomach tightens. She thumb-scrolls attachments, mentally rewrites slides, and promises a late-night update. Her parents understand, they get the check and leave without finishing dessert so Liz can tend to her "work emergency." By 9:15 p.m., she's back at her laptop, cobbling together a new slide for Lilly to review and sends it off by 10:30.
Tuesday morning, Liz skips the gym after a restless night. With no response from Lilly in Slack, she spirals. Did I miss the mark? She pings Lilly again, but Lilly's in her usual back-to-back meetings marathon. When they finally meet for their 1:1, Liz nervously presents two versions of the deck. Lilly loves both options and has no idea about the stress she caused Liz. They chose the slide to work on with the team and moved on to other topics. An unintended micro-system is born: vague ping, frantic fix, zero boundaries. It creates inefficient work patterns (double work, late-night revisions), eroded team trust (unclear priorities, mixed messages), normalized crisis mode (everything becomes "urgent"), and quality risks (rushed work, fragmented focus).
These harmful patterns didn't emerge by accident. They're the product of thirty years of technological evolution that changed how we work before we could design systems to manage it. Email, smartphones, and chat started as innovations to increase productivity but evolved into always-on tethers to work. To understand how to fix these systems, we need to understand how they broke in the first place.
Before digital communication, work boundaries were physical. My parents could bring work home. Dad reviewed his audiology charts, and Mom updated her lesson plans. But after-hours collaboration wasn't expected because it wasn't possible. Email created our first always-available communication channel. By 2002, according to Pew Research, 57 million U.S. employees had internet access, and 98% used email. The system challenge? Distinguishing between FYI messages and urgent needs.
In 1999, the BlackBerry arrived, merging tech and questionable fashion into one clip-on accessory. But this fashion faux pas had serious consequences: The majority of Americans feel significant pressure to reply to emails promptly, with over half of us being so chained to our inboxes that we respond to non-urgent emails in less than 4 hours. The system challenge intensified: When every notification could be urgent, everything becomes urgent by default.
The iPhone's arrival in 2007 put the entire internet in our pockets, and Slack's launch in 2013 eliminated the last natural breaks in our workday. Together, they created a perfect storm of constant connectivity. Microsoft's 2022 Work Trend Index reveals the result: Teams chats after hours increased 42%, creating a "triple-peak" workday of morning, afternoon, and late night. The system challenge reached its apex: Instant messaging became a constant interruption without clear protocols.
While U.S. companies normalized these always-on patterns, other regions designed intentional boundaries. The contrast is striking: The U.S. remains the only developed nation without federal mandates for paid vacation or holidays, while European countries require at least four weeks. However, the real difference isn't in policies but in system design.
Take Owkin, an agentic AI company in the healthcare space based in France. Their Chief People Officer, Mariabrisa Olivares, doesn't just rely on France's mandatory 35 vacation days. Their system includes specific practices: summer hours ending at 1 PM on Fridays, leaders walking the office at day's end to encourage junior staff to leave, and clear protocols for urgent versus non-urgent communication. The result? Better-rested employees who are more creative and collaborative, with no loss in productivity.
But the system design challenge isn't just geographical—it's generational. A recent TRUCE Software study revealed a telling divide: 57% of employees over forty-five see boundary-setting as personal responsibility, while less than half under forty-five agree. It makes sense: those who started careers before smartphones learned to draw their own lines; those who entered an always-connected workplace expect organizational guardrails. This generational shift, combined with cultural differences, makes clear system design more crucial than ever.
The evolution from physical boundaries to digital chaos to intentional system design shows us both the problem and the solution. As technology dissolved natural work boundaries, it created a vacuum that must be filled with intentional design. The question isn't whether we need systems (we do), but how to build them effectively at every level of an organization.
Creating effective work-life boundaries requires alignment across the entire organization. Success depends on clear organizational systems, consistent leadership modeling, and confident execution by employees. Here's how each level contributes to a culture that works:
Organizations must create the infrastructure that enables healthy boundaries. This means moving beyond values like "work smarter" to establish specific, actionable behaviors and practices:
Leaders turn organizational practices into lived reality through their daily actions. Their behavior sets the tone for what's valued versus what's said:
When leaders consistently model these practices, teams feel empowered to protect their boundaries, knowing they have their managers' support.
With strong organizational systems and leadership support in place, employees can confidently manage their boundaries:
Personal responsibility becomes meaningful, not as a replacement for organizational support, but as the final piece that makes sound systems work. When Liz knows she has both the tools and the backing to maintain boundaries, she can confidently finish dinner with her parents, knowing work will be there tomorrow.
This three-level framework shows how effective cultures work. But the path from chaos to clarity isn't simple. As organizations begin these changes, they face two key hurdles:
The most immediate obstacle is pushback from those who've mastered, succeeded, and even rewarded, in the current chaos. High performers who thrive in always-on environments often see new boundaries as constraints rather than enablers. When a team first implements communication protocols or meeting-free days, the initial resistance usually comes from its most successful employees.
The ultimate challenge is finding the sweet spot between chaos and bureaucracy. Too few boundaries create the burnout-inducing environment we see today, and too many rules can create rigid systems that stifle innovation. Global operations make this especially complex when teams span Singapore, London, and San Francisco, what constitutes "after hours"? What about headquarters versus global hubs?
Smart organizations solve this through tiered systems. My global teams implemented "core collaboration hours" (10am-2pm in each major hub's time zone) for cross-regional meetings, while protecting local team time for focused work. Three guidelines came with this tiered approach:
This approach provides structure without rigidity, allowing teams to maintain both global consistency and local autonomy.
While these challenges may look different for startups versus enterprises or local versus global teams, the core principle remains: intentional system design must scale with the organization.
When Emma Grede declares work-life balance "your problem" and Jamie Dimon tells students, "If you're frenzied, it's you," they reveal how deeply entrenched our broken systems have become. Their success in high-pressure environments proves their adaptability—but trying to implement that individual approach across an organization doesn't scale.
What if these influential voices focused less on work-life balance altogether and championed better systems? What if Grede shared how Good American's communication protocols protect creative time? What if Dimon explained how JPMorgan's leadership practices prevent that frenzy in the first place? These conversations could dramatically shift how we work.
The path forward isn't perfect systems, but intentionally designed ones. Well-designed practices, consistent modeling, and confident execution create more than balance—they create success. And that's not just better for employees, it's better for business.