Living above the shop

As a Salvation Army officer (minister), together with my Australian husband, our first posting was to a new Salvation Army church in Western Australia. There was no church hall, just a large house and a shed on a five-acre block. The long-term plan was to build a church and community centre on site.

Plenty of activities were run from our home and the semi-detached room four paces from our sliding kitchen door. As an introverted person, having so many people coming and going from where I lived took some getting used to. Especially as our first child was born a few months after we arrived. Sometimes it was hard to know where work ended and life-beyond-work began—the physical boundaries were just not clear.

Our second posting was to a congregation with a 75-year heritage. They had a new and well-appointed worship and community centre—a busy place. This time, our back door was maybe 30 paces from the church building, but there still wasn’t a lot of privacy. With a few more years’ experience behind us, it was easier to put some boundaries in place, but there was still the temptation to allow work tasks to squeeze out family and relationship time. There was still the question of where work ended and home began.

It’s known as ‘living above the shop’ when we live and work in more or less the same location. Clergy have been used to this arrangement for a long time, but plenty of other professions also live above the shop. The British Prime Minister, for instance, and some small business owners.

Recently, UK designer Sir Terence Conran proposed a modern twist on this old model when he suggested customising flats for young workers in Britain’s largest towns and cities so they could live in the same buildings as they worked. The idea of getting rid of the tedious commute was attractive, but generally people were horrified. One young woman said, ‘I like my colleagues, but not enough to live with them!’

Most people didn’t like the idea of merging work and home, which they feared would make them feel as if they never really left work. Some complained they were already spending too much time tied to their desks and that this would only make things worse.

This is the most obvious pitfall to living above the shop: it presents a danger to a healthy work/life balance—especially for those not good at establishing healthy boundaries.

In The Essential Guide to Burnout (see latest War Cry), authors Andrew and Dr Elizabeth Proctor suggest that living above the shop is becoming the norm for lots of people. Most people today have a mobile phone and laptop, and are expected to be available 24-hours a day—for no extra pay. ‘It is not unusual for employees to receive emails and phone calls well outside of office hours, and to be expected to respond to them,’ say the Proctors. ‘We feel the need to check for emails constantly, and are not really able to switch off mentally and forget about work.’

New Zealand workers were among the first to claim the right to an eight-hour working day in 1840. One hundred years later, the 40-hour working week was almost universal in New Zealand. Yet, in the 21st century, we are in danger of making the loose-edged day (perhaps inhabited by fray-edged people), the norm. Some of us would even struggle to imagine what it might be like to leave our workplace and switch off from work completely. Perhaps the closest we get to knowing how that feels is when we holiday somewhere with no mobile signal. At which point there’s either a delighted shout of joy, or a dismayed cry—perhaps accompanied by a rush of guilt or worry at our being ‘out of touch’.

But the Proctors emphasis how vitally important it is to be able to switch off mentally as a protective measure against stress-related illness. ‘In fact,’ they say, ‘one of the symptoms of impending burnout is an inability to switch off from work and relax and unwind even when the opportunity is available.’ They note that those working in the ‘caring professions’ may find this hardest of all. That’s because they face high expectations from three directions: themselves, their employers, and from the general public. Add to that the expectations from family and it can be very hard to live balanced lives.

There’s an increasingly blurred line between home and work, productivity and play these days. And it’s easy for some workers to give too much, and for some employers to ask too much. Of course, we could wait for employers to draw the line for us, but it’s not a bad idea to be the one to erect and police our own boundaries.

Suggested strategies include keeping work files on a work laptop, and engaging in the more fun and relaxing technology activities (like playing games or watching DVDs) on a tablet or home PC. Separating work and home emails is a definite must-do. And in these days of cheaper cell phones, some people might want to have a personal phone as well as a work phone.

No matter how close to the office we work (and with a growing movement toward people working remotely, there are likely to be more people working from home), we need to know when to put down the tools and walk toward the rest of our life. There’s a good reason why those in the past fought for legislation that enshrined the principle of a working week with maximum limits. So, even if you are working above the shop, don’t be too slow to clock off.

By Christina Tyson