How to grow your business with providing good work- life balance to your employees ?
If you scan through job offering or professional networking sites like LinkedIn etc., you will notice majority of hiring organizations offer good company culture as a benefit of working in their organization. In that great company culture they have at the company, they offer free lunches, subsidized cafeteria facilities , a stocked kitchen, good health care facilities and a benefits package you can’t turn down. But how many of these organizations use the buzzwords to find applicants but fail to deliver that dream work environment?
Many companies are trying to create a conducive and happy work place. Good companies are realising work place wellness entails much more than providing subsidised or free food and good health care facility. Employers are accepting that consistent efforts are required for creating good work place environment . The companies are recognising that for employees to be dedicated and productive, they need to encourage employees to pursue work-life balance actively.
What’s a good work –life balance ?
A healthy work-life balance means you are able to live purposeful and meaningful life where you are happy with yourself , at work place and at home with family and friends.
The pressure of an increasingly demanding work culture is one of the biggest causes of stress for employees affecting their s mental health.
What does a good work-life balance looks like ?
A healthy work-life balance will mean different things to different people. Is it just dividing your time half for your professional and personal life ? No, it is just not allocating half time to work and life but ensuring you feel satisfied in both areas of your life
A healthy balance might look like:
- Meeting your targets at work while still having personal time for self ,families and friends
- Having enough time to sleep properly
- You are able to eat well
- You are not worrying about home while at work when worrying for work when you’re not at work .
This can be challenging if, for example, we also have family responsibilities, a demanding boss or health difficulties.
What are indicators of unhealthy work-life balance ?
As an employer, it might be hard to judge whether you are supporting your employees’ need to balance their work commitments with their personal commitments out side work life.
Some dangerous signals of poor work-life balance in your employees include:
- High health care costs
- High work place accidents
- Decrease in productivity
- Employees doing a lot of overtime
- Employees taking a lot of time off to deal with ’emergencies’ involving children or other dependants
- High levels of employee stress
- High rates of absenteeism or staff sickness
- High levels of staff turnover
If you recognise a number of these symptoms affecting your employees and your company you may need to take action to review work-life balance and set ball rolling to set up program for healthy work-life balance in your workplace.
How employers can help ?
Employers can play a great role in creating healthy and happy work-place by providing opportunities to their employees to attain healthy work-life balance. Some measures can be taken are :
- Discourage a culture of yes man and accept constructive feedback
- Encourage a culture of transparency and freedom to express for employees to speak up if they feel work pressure
- Train managers to spot stress and poor work-life balance
- Provide option of flexible and remote working wherever feasible
- Encourage breaks, whether that’s during the working day or by using annual leave
- Regularly review job roles and workload to make sure it’s achievable
- Encourage and give time off to volunteer
- Provide adequate support to meet their family responsibilities
- Encourage and provide counselling facilities during working hours
- Organize wellness activities like group exercise, health fairs, nutrition education
- Organize stress management activities like group meditation
- Get out side experts like health and wellness coaches, fitness instructors
- Get feed back from employees on suggestions for improving their work-life balance.
Conclusion
Employees are the most critical assets of your company . They spent majority of their time at work place and are expected to be highly productive. For employees to remain productive, their health plays a very vital role.
If employees personal life affects their health, then it affects their productivity at work place. Hence employee needs to strike a right work life balance . Though it’s individual but companies needs to provide supportive environment and facilities and help employees to pursue healthy work-life balance .
Employers can create highly productive work force by creating healthy employees with healthy work-life balance