How to Work With Your Spouse
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
And Live to Blog About It
Yet another post brought to you by your request
My husband worked for me for about a year before he opened his bike shop. It wasn’t necessarily something that either one of us planned. He lost his job. He became somewhat entrenched in the recliner by the TV. I told him he was either working for me or he was working for McDonald’s. He chose me.
After he opened his shop, I kept the books for him. I did this in my spare time, which wasn’t exactly plentiful because I was already pulling 10-hour days at my home office. After our baby was born, she spent a lot of time in a sling as I stood behind my husband’s cash register.
These days, though, I don’t help out all that much at the shop, and my husband doesn’t help out all that much with my business, either. Sure, I will sometimes watch his register for him while he’s in the John. And, sure, he was at my service a few months ago when I did a frozen dinner review for a magazine that required the dinners to be “man tested and approved.”
But, for the most part, we’re generally working apart these days, and I quite enjoy it.
At any rate, all of the tips that follow are based on those experiences along with the fact that my home office doubles as my husband’s auxiliary office, as his shop doesn’t have enough space for an office. (A quick aside: the employees refer to the bathroom there as “the office.” So, whenever I call and one of the employees tells me that my husband is “working in the office,” I know exactly what’s going on).
In addition to the advice here, you also might find useful information in the following articles that I came across recently at Simple Marriage and the Marry Blogger.
- If your home is large enough and you have the financial means to make it happen, set up two home offices in two different rooms. You each will want your own phone, your own computer, your own iPad and the like. This will prevent you from arguing over whose turn it is to use what. More important, if you are like me, one of the reasons you left corporate America was this: you were sick of working in a cubicle or sharing an office with someone else. We all crave a certain amount of privacy while we work. Just because you are working with your spouse doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly enjoy sharing an office.
- Decide who is in charge. Every corporate business has a boss, and a boss’s boss and so on. Yet, most mom and pop small businesses do not, and this creates loads of simmering tension. When my husband works for me, I’m in charge. When I work for him, he’s in charge. If I don’t agree with how he’s running his business, I tell him, and then I let him decide what to do with that information. I don’t hammer away at him until he does what I want.
- Write job descriptions. Know who is going to do what before what needs to get done in a hurry. When you run a small business, there are many tasks that fall well beyond your comfort zone. It’s important to know whose job involves fixing the paper jam in the printer, reading and signing the business tax return, and researching the iPad and figuring out if the business really needs one.
- Set deadlines. When I want my husband to do something for me, I give him a specific deadline. Otherwise he’ll assume it’s not very important and he won’t get around to doing it. A slight aside: I’ve found that most people operate more efficiently when you give them a deadline.
- Hire the best employee for the job. I did his accounting for him not because he didn’t want to do it (he didn’t) but because I was good at it. He used to fix my computer for me not because I was scared to do it (I was), but because he was quite good at doing that sort of thing. Then I switched from a PC to a Mac. Now, my computer never breaks. The point is this: Figure out who is better at what and have the better person do what.
- Be co-workers by day, spouses by night. Part of the problem of working with a spouse is the inherent lack of boundaries and office etiquette. Most of us would never think to micromanage a colleague, but we think nothing of doing it to a spouse. We also would probably never call a colleague at 9 p.m. at night about a trivial work matter, but we would wake our spouse out of a deep sleep to do so. I find it healthier to emotionally separate my role as wife from my role as business partner. You might as well.
What advice do you have for couples that work together? Have you ever worked with your spouse? How did it go? Share your stories and insights in the comments area.
