I’ve worked in an org where our CEO had the same sentiment. He preferred the term “work life satisfaction” . Worst thing was, if you really prodded him on it it became clear the definition was basically the same. He just didn’t like the negativity some people had when talking about work life balance.
We all had to quietly nod in agreement in those meetings and then literally everyone else openly talked about work life balance regularly. Being on the hiring team in that company quite, quite often the phrase comes up in interviews. Even our head of HR, thankfully, wouldn’t regurgitate the weird language around that to potential hires asking about work life balance.
Ultimately, executives are just humans. Humans have flaws and sometimes those flaws materialize in pedantic phraseology. People hope their execs are these perfect all-knowing individuals and that’s just never the case. It’s a combination of _some_ amount of competency and a whole lot of luck that put them there in all cases.
No. Execs are not "just humans." They are enormously privileged, often not due to skill but due to proximity / birth, and there is no excuse for this kind of behavior.
You want to make buckets loads of money and tell other people what to do? Then you need some empathy for workers who aren't stakeholders making peanuts compared to you. That is the most basic of basic requirement to be in such a position of privilege.
It isn't "just human" to be a slave driver. It is criminally inhumane. I can only hope these people will face some kind of karmic justice for their gross inhumane negligence.
Same at Amazon. Bezos often talked about "work life harmony" which he liked to say instead of "balance." His reasoning was that balance implies a zero-sum tradeoff in which more dedication to one takes away from the other (a characterization he didn't like).
But simply calling it "harmony" doesn't magically make those tradeoffs go away.
We all had to quietly nod in agreement in those meetings and then literally everyone else openly talked about work life balance regularly. Being on the hiring team in that company quite, quite often the phrase comes up in interviews. Even our head of HR, thankfully, wouldn’t regurgitate the weird language around that to potential hires asking about work life balance.
Ultimately, executives are just humans. Humans have flaws and sometimes those flaws materialize in pedantic phraseology. People hope their execs are these perfect all-knowing individuals and that’s just never the case. It’s a combination of _some_ amount of competency and a whole lot of luck that put them there in all cases.