Integrating Work-life Harmony in Retirement | Stew Friedman

How Does Work-life Balance Apply to Retirement?

Dan Loney: We talk a lot about work-life balance when we’re going along in our careers, but should we talk about it in respect to retirement? Pleasure to be joined here by Stewart Friedman, who’s director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, and he’s emeritus professor of management here at the Wharton School.

Stew, how much do we consider the concept of work-life balance when we’re thinking about retirement?

Stewart Friedman: I think most people underestimate the shift that occurs in your life as you move from working to not working. Although for many people today, it’s a much smoother, not as radical a shift as it had been in the past as people are staying more engaged in various kinds of professional or close to professional activities, even as they age and get into retirement, and then formal retirement of really doing nothing at all. But the parts that are under-attended to are important to focus on, because you still have to figure out what does it mean for you to be a leader in the different parts of your life, and to create harmony among the different parts. That doesn’t go away.

Loney: When you’re thinking about retirement moving forward, is there still a level of balance that you need to have?

Friedman: I prefer to think of harmony or integration, because balance implies the necessity of trade-off. The scales and balance mean that to be successful in one part, you have to forsake the other parts. What I’ve been focusing on for most of my career is a set of tools and concepts that are based on the idea that looking for harmony or mutual value among the different parts of your life, your work, your home, your community, and your private self, you can find ways of breaking past the notion of balance and towards the idea of, where are opportunities for me to bring the different parts of my life together in a way that are mutually reinforcing, so that what I do in the community enriches my professional life, what I do for myself personally, my mind, body, and spirit, how does that enrich my family and my career and my community? And that’s, I think, a healthier way to go about it, as we have found from our research and practice for now over 30 years.

Loney: But going back to something you said a moment ago, that dynamic of people maybe having that 40- or 50-year career, but still having some component of work even after they retire, you’re carrying a set of learned experiences from over that period of time into that next phase of your life.

Friedman: Yeah, it’s good way to put it. Those don’t go away. It’s a matter of how you’re going to apply what you care about and the skills and knowledge that you’ve accumulated over the course of your life and career. How are you going to bring that into this new phase where you’re not as fully engaged in professional pursuits, if you’re involved in them at all? Thinking about what matters to you, who matters to you, why they matter to you, and what you can do to be continually experimenting with different ways of getting things done that serve both your values and your vision of a better tomorrow, your vision of a better future, in a way that serves the interests of the people around you.

Trying out new ways of getting things done that allow you to learn more about how you can continue to create change, continue to be pursuing a life that’s sustainable, because it works not just for your personal life, not just for your family life, not just for your community life, not just for whatever your professional identity is, in whatever phase of life you’re in, but for all those different parts. And I think that that same set of principles holds true no matter what life stage, including and perhaps especially in retirement, especially speaking from my own personal experience. I’m kind of there now.

Finding Meaning Later in Life

Loney: Well, I was going to say you’re in that emeritus stage. How have you seen it play directly as an impact on your life and your career?

Friedman: In so many interesting ways. I don’t want this to be all about my story, but I’ve certainly been paying attention to what’s happening in my own evolution. I became emeritus in 2019, and that was the end of my teaching full time MBA and undergraduate programs here at Wharton. I continued to teach in the Executive MBA program for the last five years, and then last year was my last year of doing that. So, I am no longer teaching here.

I do have a consulting company where we do training and management consulting to help people use these principles that we developed in Total Leadership, which was the course I’d been teaching here for a few decades, based on what we’d been learning about how to integrate the different parts of life as a leader in all of them. I continue to teach those, bring those to companies, but I’m no longer teaching.

When I got into this game, when I decided I wanted to be a college professor 45 years ago, it was because I loved teaching. I had a chance to do some teaching when I was young, and I thought, “I want to continue to do that.” I anticipated the end of my formal teaching career as something that I would be anxious about and maybe even depressed about, as many people are when they stop working and that’s their whole identity. It was a big part of how I saw my value in the world. I don’t miss it. I think that’s an important point for people to keep in mind as you’re anticipating retirement. The things that you think are going to matter, you got to keep your mind open to what changes in your consciousness as you think about what really matters to you, because those things have shifted for me and for many other people.

Loney: Is there a noticeable difference between what is probably the majority of our career to that period of time as we’re preparing to make that shift?

Friedman: Yes, for sure. Now, I’m very fortunate because I’ve been able to gradually scale down, reduce my teaching step by step by step, and that was really helpful. I’ve been scaling up in doing things that matter to me, that are still a part of my professional identity. I spent a lot of time now mentoring former students, coaching people in the next generation. That’s very fulfilling for me, and it’s still sort of professional work, but it’s pro bono, it’s fun, and it keeps me feeling relevant.

Loney: Is that, in part, why we see people make a shift in their career later on? Because they know they’re preparing for that next phase of life, but they want to find that connection, that something that is going to lead them in that right path for that next five years, 10 years,

Friedman: I think that’s it. You’ve hit the nail, in the sense that the most important feature of finding harmony among the different parts of life is to be grounded in your values, your sense of purpose, the meaning of your life. It’s the age-old question, but the answers to those questions change as you grow, as new opportunities emerge, as others disappear. Looking for something that creates for you a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, value, like you’re doing something that matters, is the most important aspect of anticipating and then working through the phase from full-time work to retirement.

Loney: You talked about having a kind of slow shift and change with your career, but I think the perception is that when you get to that time where you’re going to retire, that it kind of falls off the cliff.

Friedman: For some people, it does. A good friend of mine who’s a radiologist, he just retired. One day he was working, and the next day he was not. Boom, nothing. That’s it. He’s not going to conferences, he’s not writing papers, he’s not consulting to the junior people in his world. For him, I think it was just a lot harder to make adjustments when it is so sudden.

My experience, both personally and professionally as I coach other people, as they’re asking new and important questions about how do they find harmony in the different parts of their lives, what is it going to make my life meaningful, and how can I use what I’ve gathered? How can I harvest what I’ve grown, and use it in a way that is helpful to other people? That’s the simple way of thinking about where to find meaning and purpose in your work, in your life, even as you’re no longer working full time. And there’s lots and lots of ways to do that, of course.

Are We Thinking Differently About Retirement?

Loney: How relatively new is this concept of thinking about work-life balance or harmony as we head towards retirement?

Friedman: That’s a great point, because the whole notion of thinking about who you are in all the different parts of your life, and how to find ways of bringing them together in a meaningful way, it was not normal to be thinking in those terms when I first started teaching here in 1984. There was kind of strict segmentation between your work life and the rest of your life. Indeed, when I started talking about work and life in the late ‘80s here in my classes, there are a lot of people who thought that that was not just weird, but inappropriate. Like, “What are you talking about? This is the Wharton School. We don’t care about children and families.” I’m paraphrasing and caricaturing the extreme reaction, but it was not normal.

Now, thank goodness, we have progressed to the point where it’s standard, and it’s legitimate, and it’s healthy, and useful to be thinking about the different parts affect each other. Once you start asking those questions, they don’t stop, and they continue throughout your life and career.

Loney: In some cases, there are the external factors that have come into play in the last 15 years. The financial crisis. We’ve had the pandemic. We’re seeing an impact from inflation. Take us through that component of outside factors and how they can play a role in this process of thinking about retirement.

Friedman: I think the pandemic, as you point out, has had a major shift, along with the advent of new means of communication and the ability to work anywhere anytime, which didn’t exist when we were kids. Now, that’s that is normal. There is a need to create meaningful boundaries among and between the different parts of your life, which you have to do, otherwise one interferes with the other and you can’t get anything done.

That has become much more a matter of psychology rather than the physical nature of separating work and the rest of life. Now, it’s something that you’ve got to figure out, and then have the skill to be able to negotiate those boundaries with the people with whom you’re interdependent. That aspect of how we organize our time and our lives is something that people are learning rapidly, and I think that’s a healthy adjustment. But it’s not something, that you’re born with as a skill set. You’ve got to learn it and develop it, cultivate it, take it seriously.

Loney: Is retirement something that companies consider as their employees are starting to make these decisions?

Friedman: I don’t think it’s the first thing that they’re worried about. But as it’s become more normal, more kind of expected to be asking the questions of, how you can stay healthy throughout your life as an employee, it’s natural that you’d start to then extend those questions for older people. What happens after they’re gone, especially to the extent that it affects your, if you’re just thinking in economic terms, medical expenses and how they carry forward for employers.