The Benefits of Working for a Company that Encourages Work Life Balance
We’re launching a new series in sync with our Hockey’s Hidden Heroes program to highlight great Canadians that are able to handle two full time jobs – one at the office and one at the rink. On a bi-weekly basis, we aim to provide you snippets of how employees at Cisco and our Partners are balancing their work and hockey life. These stories will come from everyone in the organization, and we hope that they inspire you to share your work life balance story whether it be between your work and hockey life, or your work and your other passions that you strive to accomplish every day.
For this first story, we’d like to introduce to Kimberley Behnan – Senior Market Manager and Team Lead here at Cisco Canada. Known as the token “Hockey Mom” on the Marketing team she told us her philosophy and story for balancing the demands of both work and life.
From speaking to Kimberley and our other Hockey Heroes, we’ve noticed three clear themes:
- It’s about the company culture,
- The copious amounts of being on the road and the rink
- Always needing to be there for work and life.
Kimberley’s story speaks about a level of acceptance and trust not only from her immediate team and colleagues but from the company itself and also the executive team. The trust that regardless of what non-traditional location she’s in for her son’s hockey tournament that work will still be finished and that life with her family will not be affected in any way.
This notion of balancing the passion for her job and love for her family really shines through. She tells us that, “My love for my job at Cisco and my love for my job as ‘hockey mom’ to my 10-year old son, Tye; takes up a good part of my hours each week. My husband and I typically spend on average 6 days a week at the rink; we are expected to be at the games 1-hr prior and 30 min prior to practice; this becomes an issue as our division is quite large in distance and riddled with traffic congestion.” With all this time on the road, she’s able to use Collaboration tools like WebEx and AnyConnect to work effortless at her virtual office, the rink. Regardless of where she is, she is “always on’ in real time– finishing deadlines on email, participating in conference calls, hosting meetings via video, and engaging in IM chats. The best part of a stress free virtual work environment is being able to get work done and be able to fully focus on my family and cheering my son on when the Ref drops the puck.”
To read Kimberly’s full story, click here.
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This is SOOOO ME as well… Great story