Most employees today work in highly stressful and competitive environments, where the traditional 9-5 work schedule has become rare. This impacts the personal and professional lives of employees. Hence, organizations today are trying to promote a better work-life balance for their employees.
The term work-life balance is part of almost every corporate discussion these days.
HR experts consider it critical for building a highly motivated and engaged workforce. It is the ability to achieve a sense of balance between personal and professional lives.
A healthy work-life balance makes it easier for employees to excel in their workplace while enjoying a fulfilling life outside.
It is possible if employees can split their time evenly to fulfill their professional responsibilities and their passions.
A healthy balance between work and life directly impacts employee engagement and motivation levels besides ensuring their good health and happiness.
A poor work-life balance, on the other hand, leaves employees in poor physical, mental, and emotional health reducing their productivity.
For example, employees, who let their work eat into their time tend to remain constantly stressed.
So, employees become habituated to working long hours, with little or no time to relax or pursue other passions.
They become mentally and emotionally burdened, face the risk of burnout at work, and fall out in personal relationships.
The corporate world has countless examples where organizations have lost their best talent to this vicious circle.
Despite the significance of a healthy balance between work and personal time, ensuring sufficient personal time is not that easy for most employers.
However, organizations can consider implementing the following strategies to help their employees achieve this objective:
1. Conduct surveys to understand employee needs
2. Create awareness among employees
3. Provide flexible working options
4. Offer paid time off for important life events
Ensuring a healthy balance between work and employees’ lives is almost impossible without organizations first trying to understand the needs of their employees.
For this, organizations should conduct surveys to gain a better understanding of various work-life balance-related factors.
Excessive work pressure, unrealistic project deadlines, and the burden of personal responsibilities are common reasons.
Hence, identifying these issues helps organizations come up with strategies to ensure a better balance between work and life and higher employee motivation.
Often, the employees fail to understand the significance of a healthy balance between work and personal life.
Hence, in such cases, organizations need to create awareness about this important subject and the benefits of the same.
Therefore, organizing seminars, professional presentations or interaction sessions with experts from this field can prove extremely effective.
So, apart from providing proper guidance, such awareness programs equip them with the right tools for a balanced and healthy life.
Allowing flexible working options to employees is one of the most effective ways to ensure a better balance between work and personal needs.
Flexi-working enables employees to plan their professional tasks so that they have ample time to fulfill their personal responsibilities.
For example, employees with school-going kids might be allowed to start work early, to help manage their time better.
Similarly, those with extremely young children or aged parents requiring attention can be given the freedom to work from home.
In numerous similar situations, providing flexible work options can be a boon for the employees.
Some personal events in employees’ lives are so important that they have higher priority than work.
Events such as engagement, marriage, parenthood, or even an immediate family member’s death fall under this category.
Offering paid time off to employees to attend such life events can help enhance the sense of belonging and loyalty to the organization.
This significantly impacts employee motivation and results in higher productivity and business impact.
The efforts made by employers to ensure a healthy work-life balance assure employees of being valued not just as an asset but also as a human being. This can help in increasing the overall productivity and efficiency of the workforce.
Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of experience in the corporate world and entrepreneurship. In the past, Sagar has worked with companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank, in leadership roles. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn
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