28 August 2024
Understanding Work-Life Balance: Tips for a more civil workplace
‘I wish I had a better work-life balance’. We hear that from so many employees, and employers need to start accounting for that. Here’s how you can get started making this essential change.
In order to understand the importance of work-life balance, it’s important to figure out our working definition.
The problem we run into is that different people have different definitions of work-life balance. It’s a hugely personal thing. Some might see it as having equal time spent at work and at home. Others see it as having time at work to manage personal matters (such as appointments) without have to explain themselves. Marrying these two ideas to get the best results is very important.
It’s vital you don’t leave work-life balance as a vague buzzword. Provide a solid foundation and live it, and you’ll see a huge impact on your employees’ mental health.
If you’ve got a short-term approach to work, you might think a poor work-life balance is beneficial to you. If all your employees are spending more time at work, then surely they’ll be delivering better results?
However, nothing could be further from the truth. A poor work-life balance can have a huge impact on someone’s physical and mental health. When we’re not at work, we can give our minds time to refresh, stimulate creativity and look after themselves, meaning we come back into work more energized and feeling fresh.
You can’t pour from an empty cup, after all. Ensuring your employees have a good work-life balance will lead to long-term benefits, like reduced churn rates and higher efficiency overall.
Creating Boundaries and Prioritizing
One of the keys to a healthy work-life balance is ensuring employees have strong boundaries are encouraged to keep to them. Having a strong dividing line between your work and personal life is key.
This is especially true if you offer the chance to work remotely. It can be very easy to fall into bad habits, like checking emails outside of work hours, thinking about work during personal time, and working unpaid overtime.
People can be their own worst enemies when it comes to committing to these boundaries, so you need to ensure there’s some top-down leadership. Make it clear to employees that you want them to prioritize their work-life balance, and show them you do too, and they’ll follow.
Building Supportive Work Environments
Boundaries are one thing, but without a supportive work environment, they won’t stand up to strain.
That means you need to build up lines of open communication, especially between line managers and direct reports. Creating a culture of civility, where everyone can have these vital conversations openly and honestly will create this healthy environment.
While they won’t work for everyone, flexible work arrangements have often been suggested to have a positive impact on work-life balance, especially if it helps employees have more control over their commute.
Managing Stress and Well-being
Burnout is what. There are a range of physical and mental symptoms for burnout, including:
- Tiredness
- Feeling detached or isolated
- Headaches
- Lacking motivation
- A loss of appetite
These aren’t the only symptoms of burnout. The crucial one to look out for is a change in behavior. If someone who’s usually quite extroverted suddenly seems quite shy, this could be a sign of burnout.
When burnout hits, it can be very difficult to recover without making major adjustments. To find out more about how and when burnout can strike, check out our blogs on the subject.
Embracing Work-life Balance as a Continuous Journey
It’s important to understand that improving the work-life balance of your employees is not a onetime thing. You can’t just put in some new policies and hope for the best. The crucial thing is to adapt to changing circumstances, and adjust those priorities as needed. You’ll also need to encourage your employees to do this too, helping them find harmony between personal and professional goals.
For example, it’s easier to promote work-life balance when workloads are low! When things are going well, there’s no strain to the business when someone prioritizes their personal life. But what do you do when the going gets tough? Having processes in place to maintain work-life balance in those circumstances is even more critical.
Putting civility, and ensuring employees are well treated is vital to have an organization that can thrive for years to come.
It’s also important not to neglect the tools that support a better workplace. Good HR tech can shift a lot of the labor burden from your HR managers to the system, freeing them up to focus on the bigger picture. Not only does that help them enhance the employee experience of the rest of the organization, it makes their day better too! Through HR software, you can leverage check-ins, sentiment analysis, and other tools to make the world of work flow better.
Want to learn more about how to build a good work-life balance? A lot of it comes down to building a great employee experience, built around compassion and civility.
Check out this blog for even more details.
