Working in a company and fulfilling targets on a daily basis could be extremely overwhelming for an employee. Employees are often busy working at the office, even on the weekends, which gives them limited time to have quality time with their friends and family. Due to workload, often family members and kids get neglected. Stressful work can also deteriorate an employee’s health. This is where one needs to balance their life.
Work-life balance helps a person prioritize and maintain a balance between their personal and professional life. This helps to encourage employees to give importance to work while maintaining a balance by giving time to prioritize health, family, friends, vacation, etc. Employees need to take time out of their work to invest in themselves. This not only helps in their personal growth but also impacts performance at the workplace.
What Is The Importance Of Having A Work-Life Balance?
Whenever we hear about work-life balance company examples, it often involves a workplace where an employee can work while being able to take time for themselves and their family. Generally, it leads to a significant change in the employee and his/her productivity at the workplace.
Work-Life Balance Helps To Maintain Mental Health
When a person has a balanced work life, they can simultaneously focus on themselves, their family as well as their work. This highly contributes to making the employees happy and a happy employee always acts as a significant asset to a company. This also helps to prevent two extremely harmful symptoms.
Chronic stress happens when an employee is continuously stressed. It can even lead to mental health problems like depression, insomnia, and anxiety, along with physical health problems like chronic pains and aches, hypertension, and heart troubles.
Burnout occurs when workers experience too much stress for a long period. Burnout could also be the reason behind frequent mood swings and irritability. It can also impact the employee’s productivity. Your employees may also end up taking sick days, which can become problematic for the organization or company. However, when they take small breaks regularly to clear their mind, employees are more likely to offer better performance.
It Is Beneficial For Physical Health
Overwork can take a really bad toll on the physical health of employees. When it comes to working efficiently, an employee needs to be focused and active but having to stay at the office till late at night, and skipping lunch breaks can easily affect one’s physical health and hamper their productivity.
People who always overwork are often found to have issues like chronic pain or carpal tunnel syndrome. This is mostly noticed when the environment of the office is not ergonomic. Staying late till late at night at the office can increase the risk of getting heart disease as well as higher blood pressure. The more healthy your employees are, the more they can contribute to the company.
It Intensifies Productivity
Productive employees are the assets of a company. This is where the importance of having a work-life balance comes into the scene. If an employee’s work life is balanced then they would be much more satisfied and happier with their jobs. This can contribute to greater productivity. One might think that staying at the office and working overtime can increase productivity but it is the opposite. In reality, working this way often leads to less productivity.
How To Promote Work-Life Balance In Your Organization?
If you are confused about how to promote work-life balance for employees, here are some work-life balance problems and solutions that would help you to avoid issues in the workplace and promote work-life balance.
1. Ask Employees Regarding Their Needs
The easiest thing you can do is to do a survey and ask them directly “what are your thoughts on work-life balance”. This way you will get a clear idea and will be able to understand what your employees really require. You may have a normal idea of how a work-life balance should be.
But you must understand how your workers are doing personally as well as what they need to maintain a balance between work and life. You can involve questions in this survey such as work hours if they need an extra day off to handle their kids, as well as flexible scheduling. This can help to highlight specific areas where you need to work to promote work-life balance.
2. Observe The Employee’s Mental Health And Stress Levels
Stress is real, it can easily affect your employee’s health, and an organization’s productivity, in turn. If you have been an employer before you are familiar with how organizations promote a work-life balance and you might also know that helps to make a difference for employees.
Working extra hours, skipping lunch breaks, and spending a lot of time at the office instead of at home can increase one’s stress levels. Even it has been proven by science as well. Stress can easily increase the chances of experiencing stroke and heart attacks. It can lead to anxiety & depression as well.
Longer hours of working never lead to better productivity. If your employees are burned out, overstressed, and facing stress-related issues, then this can easily impact the productivity of your company. If it goes like this, an organization would end up losing its best, hard-working employees. Should you look carefully, you will realize that those who work for limited hours & take some time off to refresh their mind are the ones who work more productively.
On the other side, researchers have found that if organizations give importance to promoting a better work-life balance for the employees then the entire organization benefits from it. Employees with good mental health are much more productive than others. They feel valued in their workplace. Retention Increased. Absenteeism decreases. In simple words, it helps to promote a healthy work-life balance among everyone.
3. Teach Employees About Work-Life Balance
Conduct work-life balance programs in organizations where you will be able to help your employees to understand how much they matter to the organization. Encourage them to take days off if they feel it is necessary for their health. Provide them with better ways and ideas on how they can manage every task they get in a better way.
4. Consider Flexible Working Hours To Promote Work-Life Balance
Another thing that can help you in promoting a work-life balance is a flexible work routine. This way employees can find time for their professional life as well as for their personal life.
Flexible scheduling can help to encourage employees to engage in conversations with their teams and determine how they can contribute more to the company without being overstressed.
There are so many options that can help your employee in flexible scheduling. They can work less a day and work for an extra hour the next day. This way they can look after themselves and their family. In this way, you can make your employees feel that they are valued and they matter to the company.
5. Teach Them To Work Smarter, But Not Harder
To promote a work-life balance, you can also offer a few work-life balance examples and encourage your employees to work smarter and not harder, as efficiency is all about getting a good amount of work done in a short period. Much research has shown that those who work for a longer time, often provide low productivity. This is because longer hours could lead to depression, irritability, exhaustion, and anxiety.
6. Allow Work From Home
Studies have shown that even before the Covid-19 and lockdown, employees who worked from home were much more productive than those who came to the office daily. Thus, you can always consider providing work from home opportunities for your employees.
This would reduce office overhead and the working parents can take care of their kids and their work simultaneously. It would also help to retain workers and foster a good relationship between employers and employees.
7. Be An Example For Your Employees
There is no doubt that leaders help their employees to be efficient and skilled. Therefore, you need to be an example for them. As a business owner or a leader, maintaining a flexible work schedule shows them that taking personal time is necessary. This will motivate them to be more efficient and productive at the same time.
8. Promote Employee Health Initiatives
You can also sponsor employee’s’ fitness activities like sports activities and office yoga. Many big companies like Google have gym areas and hockey rinks in the office for their employees.
Several companies have benefited from this. Having such an option at the office can make work life interesting for your employers. They can also take some time off from work to freshen their mind. This will not only create an exciting work environment but promote better productivity.
9. Use a Good Time & Attendance Software
One of the most crucial factors in promoting a healthy work-life balance is time management. Using a good time & attendance software can help you keep track of your time and activities through maintaining time sheets, shareable to-do lists, getting work-based reminders etc.
When facing such issues in your company you can always follow these innovative ideas for work-life balance above-mentioned issues.
Conclusion
Work-life can be hectic and stressful but maintaining a work-life balance is very crucial. It not only affects employees’ entire health but also impacts their performance at the workplace. The workers always need to maintain a perfect balance between work and personal life to be productive and healthy.
The importance of work-life balance also throws light to the benefits of time & attendance software. It proves to be a reliable way of maintaining work-life balance, which proves why businesses need to introduce time tracking software in creating less time and energy-draining workplaces.
