Work Life Balance

Generally, in architectural practises, office hours get stretched a little bit. Not only for junior ranks or interns during peak periods – it’s common. You know - architectural practices have a lot of hour-sucking work. Funny enough, architects are often proud of that.

Being surrounded mostly by colleagues younger than thirty might be a good indicator for an office with a bad work life balance policy. People tend to leave these kind of places when they get older and switch to a firm that reflects their demands for life: spend time with family and kids, develop new interests, learning a language, charity work, ...

I don't mind hard work – but it's important to have a life outside the office. Architects have to give their clients an optimistic outlook to something new. How should they do that if they’re just staying in the office?

In many architectural practices employees hardly have any influence whether or not they have to do overtime work. If you got a deadline, people naturally expect you to stay (overnight). Have you ever done a design competition without night shifts? Especially in small architectural practices there is usually no possibility of refusing overtime work. Yet, in some cases you would get the office in big troubles (and you wouldn’t be a good colleague). Stupidly, many employees in architectural offices don’t even get any extra financial compensation for overtime.These are elements of employees’ weak "time-sovereignty" which strongly affects the work-life balance. Unfortunately it’s part of the architect’s working culture.