I spent several hours this week interviewing small business owners for my doctoral research. I also started watching the Apple TV series Severance, a show that explores what it would be like if you came to work with no memories and feelings from your outside life and vice versa.
Picture this: after enduring significant stress at home, you enter your workplace with no recollection of your personal life. Crazy right? Yet many large organisations expect employees to leave their home life, with all its weight and worries, at the door so they can effectively perform for the salary that serves them on the outside. Don’t get me wrong, emotional regulation is a helpful skill to develop, and I am grateful that many professionals, including surgeons, can make this mental divide – but I am thinking broader here.
As with many TV shows exploring work-life balance, the setting is large orgs. Consider shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, DMV, Superstore, Mythic Quest, IT Crowd, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Mad Men, The Morning Show, or Suits. Basically, they are fictional workplace settings utilising strong characters in a department/branch of much larger systems.
It is a sound argument that small teams of colleagues operate with similar dynamics to small businesses. But interviewing these small business owners has reminded me that for most small business owners, there is no severance. And by this I mean two things:
First, that unless someone is going to sell their small business, they can’t resign with a severance package of cash and bonuses.
And secondly, as one owner stated, ‘Big businesses are driven by policy and processes, while small business owners are driven by passion.’ Most small business owners are genuinely passionate about their products and services. And they’re passionate about their local community. They refuse to sever themselves from their work or life.
Have you ever noticed that small businesses sponsor most local sports teams, volunteer at P&Cs, Chambers of Commerce, and attend charity events en masse? Small businesses are crucial to the economy and daily living, even though 70% of their owners earn less than they would in salaried employment. Oh, and most small business profits remain in local communities too!
So why stay in small business and pay the price of job and financial security? Why make tax time more difficult? Why struggle to get a mortgage as a self-employed individual?
I suspect it is partly because work-life balance is not something small business owners want, or are hard-wired for. The idea of severance has very little appeal. Small and micro business people see work-life balance as important and, by all means, they may have more autonomy than the 9-to-5 worker. But they have traded the idea of severance for adventure, passion, and meaningful local impact.Perhaps it’s time to turn the mass media attention and government support back to small business operators.
#smallbusiness hashtag#research
pic: AppleTV & Unsplash