We all know the commercial tagline: "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." Vegas represents the place where outside concerns or worries have no impact. But can this rule be applied to other aspects of our lives?

Oscar Ybarra, professor of business administration, and his coauthor Todd Chan of the University of Michigan, used what they called “the Vegas Rule” to examine how well people separate their work life and home life. Could the ability to separate these two influences impact an individual’s ability to focus while at work? They report their findings in “What happens at Home States at Home: The Vegas Rule for Work Depends on Working Memory,” which appeared in the journal Community, Work and Family.

Ybarra (right) and Chan wanted to examine how and why some employees were able to keep stressors from their home life out of their day-to-day work life. The ability to separate these two enables focus at work.

They used data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States to uncover the impact of home life on work life. In particular, they examined the interactions of job demands, family problems, working memory, and work resources. Participants were asked about spouses, family members, children, and other categories of people. For each of these categories, respondents indicated, from a list of problems, whether they were experiencing that problem with the individual.

What they found was that everyone across all the groups surveyed faced stressors from their home life. How those problems impacted their work life, though, differed across participants.

One way that some workers seem to have a greater ability to separate these two spheres is through a stronger working memory. “Working memory is the ability to be able to hold an idea in mind and to play around with that idea,” explained Ybarra, who also serves as director of Gies’ Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society. “A good example would be if you have a goal that you want to accomplish. You have to be able to imagine that and keep it in mind. But at the same time, you're also adding pieces of information – maybe you realize you have two things done versus the four that are needed for this goal. So, you keep all of that information in mind so that you can come up with some next steps or conclusions. Working memory is what allows you to do this. You could call it a workbench that allows you to keep stuff that you need to work on a project there in mind, so that you can actually problem solve.”

Those individuals who had high working memory did not show a significant impact of family difficulties on their experience of job demands. According to the article, this would suggest that if you have a higher working memory, you are essentially buffered from the effects of family problems.

“The idea of ‘what stays at home’ means stays at home in terms of issues or stressors,” Ybarra explained. “That’s actually more likely for people who currently are performing better in terms of working memory. They are the ones who can segment the home life from the from their work.”

Ybarra thinks there’s more to be learned about the concept of working memory in the workplace, since that is something new for this area of research, and it could point to approaches to help keep home stressors from adversely affecting one’s work. “I think the focus on working memory is very novel to this line of research,” he said. “Home life knows no boundaries. And it goes both ways. It's not just life affecting work, but also work affecting life. There's a porous boundary that most people struggle with. With working memory, you’re looking at an individual’s capacity for moderating this disconnection between home and work.”