During the last 7 years, the Belgian User Support and Operations Centre (B.USOC) – a Facility Responsible Centre for the European Space Agency (ESA) - has been operating different ESA payloads on the International Space Station with outstanding results. Some key factors of this success are the people in the team, and the strategy applied to balance life and work in such a demanding world as operations for human space flight. The stress and tensions between the different Operators that could generate a negative atmosphere was converted into a positive vibe of opportunities and advantages for everybody. The paper presents the applied human resource strategy which relies, on one hand, on the conversion of a working constraint into flexibility for the people depending on their needs, and on the other hand, on a team composed on purpose of heterogeneous profiles and with very different lifestyles. © 2016, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA.