Gabriel Ginebra: Gabriel Ginebra: "Asking for a reduction in working hours to take care of children should not be frowned upon"

BarcelonaGabriel Ginebra is part of the Regional Expert Council of the TUI (Time Use Initiative) and will be one of the speakers at the Time Use Week that is being held from October 19th to 21st in Barcelona. He is part of a family of twelve siblings, he has raised seven children with his wife, and now he has two grandchildren.

We live in times of maximum production. This translates into great profits for companies, but workers are increasingly exhausted and poorer. What is failing?

— We are facing an accelerated growth that goes beyond profits. It is being produced in excess and there are not enough people to enjoy it. To the point that the current great landowners, who are the owners of the large networks, sell “benefits” much higher than their sales. Therefore, their companies grow thanks to pure speculation. We are facing a turbocapitalism, or whatever you want to call it, and people are betting and pouring money into a ruinous process. And, effectively, this leads us to an acceleration that causes professional stress to skyrocket.

In his books, courses and presentations he speaks a lot about the concept of “management of incompetence”. Is it increasingly difficult to find executives who are truly linked to the day-to-day of the company and who know how to manage teams of people well?

— Managers fall into the sacrifice syndrome, doing everything for the company and the employees. But by doing so, they deteriorate, and then comes fatigue, stress, a lack of perspective, empathy, and bad humor towards the very people they set out to care for. In reality, the more of a leader you are, that is, the more responsibility you have, the more you need to take care of yourself and remain calm. Only then will you be able to offer availability to other people in the company, to respond agilely to unexpected things that may happen day to day, and above all, to have the moment of calm where new ideas and inspirations emerge. It is more than proven that when you slow down, the ratio between search efforts and the things you manage to find increases. There is a phrase from a Hawaiian diver that says “When you feel the need to speed up, slow down” [When you feel the need to speed up, slow down] and it clearly defines that when there is a need to speed up, it is time to stop, and deep down this serves us both in professional and personal life.

And what happens when the company takes care of its employees? What is different? 

— What remains clear is what actually happens when a company does not take care of its employees, especially the most talented and committed ones. In the end, these are people who get stressed and discouraged, feel undervalued, and when they are in front of their boss, they disconnect and think about their vacation or after work, and later they start listening to other proposals. If major strategic business plans are too demanding, they end up dying because the people who are supposed to put them into practice leave. Companies that care have employees who believe more in their work and do it well, and that makes everyone involved happy.

But you also talk about the importance of keeping the stress balance in check, because I understand that this is also what activates you every day, right?

— It is true that there is a lot of talk now about stress and eustress, which would be good stress. You need stimuli to keep you active. But what is not acceptable is being constantly in this state; in the talks and processes I conduct, I find people who are stressed all week. After the Koreans, we Spaniards are the ones with the highest stress levels, curiously. In part, because we have this guilty conscience that we were supposed to be the ones who didn't do any work at all. And then, to compensate for this, we work longer hours. But something is wrong when in the Nordic countries they work half the hours we do and have the same results.

Is this when the importance of social acceleration comes in?

— Exactly, deceleration is the transmission factor that produces this Productivity Paradox effect. Because acceleration leads us to superficiality, to doing many things, but surely few are significant. The truly effective time of an ordinary workday rarely reaches 50% in management work. We often move in the 30% and 20% of the things that end up producing 80% of the impact. Increasing productivity does not depend on doing more things; more sustainable approaches are needed. It is necessary to be able to stop to recharge energies and thus also learn that only by stopping do we recover the necessary energy to return to it. A study by the consultancy Ringover calculated that, in a standard 8-hour workday, Spanish workers are only truly productive for 5 hours and 6 minutes. The rest of the time is lost due to cognitive exhaustion, distractions, and fatigue.

In which day-to-day actions of the company can we see this slowdown?

— The organizational culture and the real objectives of companies must be changed little by little. Managers must dare to delegate; it is not necessary to always supervise the work of others. It is also necessary to reduce the number of meetings, hold only the necessary ones, and ensure they do not last more than an hour. Plan with sense; projects are proposed for two years when everyone knows they will take four. And above all, set real improvement goals for people, not impossible ones that discourage. Establish schedules, such as monk time, a space of time in which calls are not put through, because the basis of good work is deep work where there is physical and mental silence to be able to concentrate for the necessary time. And above all, eliminate WhatsApp at work; I am a great defender of email, but it is not necessary to check it constantly either. In the home environment, one can slow down with small actions that gradually pacify you, and if you share them with people close to you, they become contagious. Such as meeting without mobile phones at the table, having a quiet breakfast on the weekend, etc. We all know that work is infinite, but no matter how many responsibilities one has, one must also be responsible for maintaining the sense of quality in the tasks one performs. And above all, let us remember that the working day also ends every day at a specific time, in the same way that the gym class ends and we go back home.

What would you say are the key measures that allow combining work responsibilities with family and personal life?

— There are many options such as flexible hours, teleworking, leave until children are eight or twelve years old, lights-out policies, or gym membership fees. But I repeat: if the worker's workload is over 80% (often it is 160%) and there is a culture of presenteeism and corporate activism, all of this is useless and can even be counterproductive. I also believe strongly in localism; we must incentivize the creation of companies and, therefore, jobs outside of the large capitals. Commuting to work is a major source of stress. If we want personal life to have the same power of attraction as professional life, we will have to commit ourselves as we do with work: by paying for yoga sessions, meeting with friends, or creating a group to hike in the mountains or play music. I once accompanied an executive who set out to arrive on time to pick up her son from school every day. Her son could not believe that he was a priority for his mother. We cannot continue to feel bad about teleworking one morning during the week, and not feel bad when we dedicate a Saturday or Sunday to planning our work agenda for the week.

Why is talking about children and parenting at work still a taboo?

— We can learn some good things from the United States. There, the figure of the stay home mum (or the stay home dad) is more prestigious, at least for a season of life. Harvard executives leave everything for four years to focus on taking care of their children, which is what we say matters most to us. They also have more diverse professional careers, are not afraid to get their hands dirty, and have less pressure to keep up appearances. Furthermore, there is a whole economic explanation of how a greater dedication to non-monetized personal/family activities stabilizes and enriches the economy and societies. It is much more interesting and practical for everyone to be able to take care of their own. One of my most read articles is precisely Ponga un niño en su oficina: La mejor inversión because we can really learn so much from children, but we continue to silence and hide them, to such an extent that when they come out a little, they are very bothersome. I once taught at the university with my children playing with Lego in a corner of the classroom. I also wrote my doctoral thesis with a baby in my arms. But showing ourselves to be authentic and real makes us feel uneasy. Work-life/personal balance is a collective necessity, but we live it as a secret.

But it is also true that balancing work and childcare, at least when they are little, from 0 to 6 years old, is very complicated. Either you have a reduced working day or a good family tribe behind you. How can we find this balance and make it understood that children are necessary and that they need adults around them to grow?

— Asking for a reduction in working hours to take care of your children should not be frowned upon, much less reduce your job opportunities. It is curious how the issue of work-life balance is present in conversations between families; it is what concerns and occupies us the most. But it looks bad for you to verbalize that you are renouncing applying for a promotion in category and responsibility to better attend to your family. In reality, the family/personal option is the priority. The work-related one should have a means-to-an-end relationship, even if it has an irreplaceable fulfilling consistency for the person and for society. That is also why I am a great defender of small businesses and family businesses, because there is a mix between a company project and a family or personal project. Children are necessary to sustain the social structure and also the economic one. Governments must promote birth rates more by starting to boost care networks, whether they are family-based, neighborhood or city-based, or through an association.

How do you think the companies where our sons and daughters will work will be?

— It is curious how the most futuristic ones, especially those in robotics and AI, insist on drawing a society in which the human and personal dimension is being lost, for the benefit of organization and depersonalization. Theoretically, each of these advantages was thought of to make our lives easier, but history has shown that it has complicated them for us. It is still curious that in societies with more resources and in which we can overcome distances in less time are precisely the societies in which there is more awareness of scarcity and in which we live with more speed. I believe that there is an alternative world that is emerging. I want to think that we can return to a more familiarized world of business, to environments of greater fulfillment, of craftsmanship, in which the rhythm of life does not accelerate but rather becomes the protagonist again.