If you’re asking author, advertising CEO and performance coach Nigel Marsh, the answer would be an enthusiastic (and Aussie-accented) “No.” In Marsh’s TED talk (you can watch the video at bottom of this post), in which he shares his thoughts on work/life balance and asks the oft-raised question, “What does a life well-lived look like?”, he argues that it’s not up to corporations or outside interests to determine employees’ work/life balance — it’s up to the employees themselves.

Work/life balance (or whatever phrase you want to use to refer to the idea) is often on the minds of employers and employees alike, and it’s an idea that continues to evolve as technology seeps into more and more aspects of our existence and workplace/personal lines are getting even blurrier. Marsh tells the story of his own transformation from a “classic corporate warrior” who was eating, drinking, and working too much and neglecting his family, to someone who turned 40 and decided to turn his life around and spend a year at home with his family — to a man who has, for the seven years since, spent his time struggling with studying and writing about striking a balance between “work” and “life.”

Marsh’s observations during the last seven years have led him to make four observations about work/life balance:

1) If society is to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. The problem, Marsh says, is that all of the discussions about work/life balance involve people complaining about the phrase itself. He also argues that discussions around perks like flex time and dress down Fridays only serve to mask the core issue: That certain career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. According to him, we need to start acknowledging the core issues and thinking about the issue on another level if we really want to see change.

2) We must be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our lives. We have to take responsibility for the type of lives we want to lead, Marsh argues — not rely on others to do so. In his words, “If you don’t design your own life, someone might design it for you — and you might not like their idea of balance.” Translation for employers: it’s the job of your employees (and, in your own career, yours) to decide the boundaries needed to make work and personal lives work in harmony — and that formula is going to be different for everyone.

3) We have to be careful (read: realistic) with the time frame upon which we choose to judge the balance in our life. We need to elongate balance, Marsh says, without falling into the trap of, “I’ll have a life when I retire” – or of “I’ll do everything in a day.” It’s not realistic — we must find the middle road, Marsh says. We can’t necessarily achieve everything we want to in a day, but at the same time, we can’t wait until our personal lives have fallen apart because of work to find that perfect balance. And speaking of finding that perfect balance…

4) We need to approach balance in a balanced way. We must attend to various aspects of our lives, including the intellectual, emotional and physical. And the great thing is, Marsh points out, it doesn’t always take a major overhaul to strike more of a balance in our lives — small changes can radically transform the quality of our relationships and of our lives.

Which, Marsh hopes, will bring us to a more thoughtful, balanced definition of what a life well-lived looks like.

I want to know — what are your thoughts as an employer? Do you feel responsible for your employees’ work/life balance, and do you think you have the power to make changes in the workplace that will translate to powerful and lasting changes in their sense of balance? Or do you agree with Marsh — that it’s not the job of an employer to be concerned with an employee’s work/life balance, or that, even if it is, there are no changes you can make to workplace rules and perks that will carry enough weight?

Is work/life balance about changing the structure and fluidity of the workplace to more effectively fit into our personal lives, or more about finding ways to increase our dedication to our personal lives so that they work within our given workplace structures?

Is it really up to an employee to find his or her own way (home)?

Watch Nigel Marsh’s TED talk on work/life balance here:

A recent article in the Chicago Sun-Times about Chicago Police Sgt. Jeffrey Allen’s lawsuit against the city of Chicago piqued my interest — not because he was suing the city of Chicago, but because he was suing due to the fact that he hadn’t gotten compensated for the off-duty time he spent working on his Blackberry.

As we’ve mentioned before on The Hiring Site, access to mobile devices are changing the way people work — employees are working from their smart phones while driving, on the train, or in the grocery line — and even if they don’t want to be working during all hours and from all places, bosses often expect them to. Some workers, particularly of the younger Millenials generation, are even sleeping next to their smartphones for fear of missing out on a single minute of Internet action.

And now, with this lawsuit, a new question comes to the forefront; a question that we’ve been building up to as the use of smart phones in workers’ every day lives has rapidly increased: Should workers be compensated for the work they do on company-owned mobile devices during non-work hours?

To compensate or not to compensate?

Some say yes. After all, 20 minutes here and there on the Blackberry can quickly add up to a significant amount of time spent working during non-work hours. Mobile devices like Blackberrys or PDAs leave behind a clear trail of evidence — so it’s easy for employees to prove they are actually working.

Chicago’s Mayor Daley, however, responded by saying the officer was displaying silliness in a time of economic crisis. In his own words: “This is unbelievable. We’re public servants. If I asked for that, I’d be paid millions of dollars. We’d have to take all the BlackBerrys away from public servants.”

Public servant or not, do employees have the right to be compensated for the extra work they do? As Paul Geiger, one of Sgt. Allen’s attorneys in the Chicago case, said, “We have reached a point in society where it’s very easy to get a whole lot of unpaid work from employees just by the use of these devices.” And he may have a point. Now, employees don’t have to be at home or the office chained to a bulky computer — they can access work from just about anywhere — and many employers are taking advantage of that. Employer expectations are higher than ever — yet compensation doesn’t always fall in line.

Work/life balance : Becoming a thing of the past?

More than compensation, by sending employees the message that their time is not their own if they have a company-owned device like a Blackberry, employers may be taking away any semblance of a work/life balance. This doesn’t just apply to work on mobile devices — but to work in general. With employer expectations higher and leaner staffs, employers seem to be saying that this is just the way it is. But are they unwittingly causing employees to want to leave? As CareerBuilder’s Mid-Year Job Forecast showed us, 25 percent of workers reported they have a worse opinion of their employer in the wake of the recession — and the same percentage plan to leave their place of work in the next year.

Setting guidelines for company-issued devices

As we’ve seen already in the case of a police officer getting fired for sexually explicit texts, employers want control over the messages employees are sending on company-owned devices — but with that control comes a responsibility to set and communicate clear guidelines of how these company-owned mobile devices are to be used when they are issued.

Whether employers allow overtime and compensate additionally for the extra time, or restrict employees from using the devices for work outside of working hours, or allow for a more flexible schedule, knowing that employees are working odd hours and responding to work needs all hours of the day, they need to set guidelines of where and when employees are both allowed and expected to use company-owned devices.

Where do we draw the line?

Guidelines aside, though, the bigger question remains: Is it acceptable for employees to be expected to do work e-mail while eating dinner with the family? Is doing work outside of work hours just an inevitable part of living in an über-connected society with blurred lines between our personal and professional lives? Or is this a trend that needs to take a turn in a different direction?