Work-life balance and mobile technology

With the increased connectivity in today's business environment, employees are now able to perform vital work functions away from the office - putting their superiors in a precarious position.

While obviously providing managers with opportunities to leverage more flexibility from their workforce, some may find that the rising availability of cost-effective wireless communications could have an impact on their work-life balance.

The concept used to mean that employees could leave the majority of their tasks at the office and were able to enjoy weekends without interruption from work-related activities.

But increasingly, managers with leadership training are finding that work-life balance is less about segregation of home-time and office-time and more about the level of control exerted over both.

In previous decades, if a problem cropped up over the weekend, very little could be done about it until employees returned to work to fix it.

Only in extreme cases would a manager feel compelled to return to the office during their precious time off.

But with the increasing prevalence of mobile technologies in the workplace, employers are now able to contact workers almost instantly.

So the onus is now on business owners to decide just how critical a particular assignment is before they interrupt an employee's weekend.