https://www.doingbusinessafrica.com/post/did-covid-19-quarantine-sanitize-your-life

Did Quarantine Sanitize Your Life?

The quarantine periods of the past several weeks have been a God-sent opportunity for some executives to get some rest and reflect on their busy lives.

For some, it has been a nerve-racking period of worrying about job security, pay cuts, and business shortfalls due to the lack of sales.
Whatever the lockdown must have represented to you, I would like to share with you some of my experience of an extremely busy life of working in the corporate sector while juggling a full-scale home-front.

During my first years as a staff in the banking industry, I worked in a department that consisted of fifty-five women. About seventy per cent of these women were married and some had children. Having children meant that they also had nannies or other domestic staff who helped with the home front.

These women seemed to come to work with consistent complaints about their domestic staff. Some days, they even had to take a day or two off work to sort out issues on their domestic front. Based on the frequency of problems that they seemed to face on the domestic front, I assumed that perhaps they were not very good at managing their domestic staff and that the problems arose as a result of their poor relationships with their domestic workers.

Then I got married, had children and I needed domestic staff. After six years of hiring and firing various domestic staff, I came to the conclusion that the domestic staff terrain is rather complicated.

In the past six years, I have used my experience from the previous six years to change my experience of domestic staffs. I have also used my experience to practice putting my person first no matter the level of stress, pressure or hostility in the workplace.

In the next few articles, I will be sharing some of my experiences, tips and advice with you in the hope that you will be able to avoid some of the pitfalls that hampered me in the early years of my learning to manage my personal life and domestic front along with a fulltime career.

Practice You First
During some of the most hectic days of my working in the corporate sector, I came to the realization that a lot of high-flying corporate individuals tend to think they are superman or superwoman. They ignore important health signals wishing it would eventually go away. They become so timid and intimidated by their boss that they put themselves into various kinds of danger in a bid to please the boss, meet a deadline, or keep up with the workload.

In the drive to meet and exceed expectations, they often exceed their personal physical limits and as I have seen on many occasions, they meet with sudden tragedies.

This becomes even more prevalent in an environment where the job market is extremely competitive, workplace culture is somewhat hostile, and the societal norm is to keep up with the Jones’.

It takes a drastic incident for many workers to come to the sudden realization that being able to stay alive is more important than the next promotion, or that their employers can definitely go on without them.

Employees have had road accidents while returning late in the night due to falling asleep on the wheel. Others have ignored life-threatening symptoms until it was too late, while others have seen their marriages become history as a result of running after the next promotion. These issues are even more prevalent in the Financial Services industry. There was a time when it became the norm for employees to slump in the office, have a heart attack when they got home, or even go insane while at work. The level of pressure exerted on corporate employees in Nigeria is something that should be closely looked at and employers need to be able to see the big picture and implement workplace culture that reflects some level of human empathy.

Always remember that you need to stay alive in order to do the job. So do the following:

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