Why is Work-Life Balance a Must for your Employees and How to Achieve ?

Southwest Airlines allows flexibility to employees. They are allowed to have fun at work and even given free air tickets to have vacations with their families. Colgate Palmolive encourages a healthy work-life balance and provides facilities like nearby childcare centers, emergency in-home care for dependents, health, legal and financial counseling services, among other employee benefits.

However, the reality for most organizations is different. Research reveals that even though most people do not want to, they end up working for more number of hours than they should be. But some organizations are looking into it quite seriously.

A team at Google has set out on a 100-year research to learn how to improve employee wellbeing, how to cultivate leaders, and how to keep Googlers engaged and how work and happiness impacts each other. Their research so far has revealed:

• There are segmentors: Only 31% of people are able to draw a psychological line between work stress and the rest of their lives.
• Integrators: They are in the “always-on” mode. Of these 69% of people want to become segmentors.

The researchers are finding it troubling that such a large part of Google’s employees want to separate their work and life but aren’t able to.

An article in Fast Company shares strategies that can help companies help their employees achieve work-life balance.

Results-only work environment

The concept of ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) is a human resource management strategy. In this strategy, team members are measured by their performance, output and results, not by their presence in the office or the number of hours that they put in. The benefit: It provides freedom and flexibility. 

Organizations that practice it: MindTools, American Society of Clinical Oncology, some departments of Gap

Remote teams

In this strategy, employees are allowed to work remotely. As a result employees can manage their work and life commitments. Moreover, collaborative technology has made this possible and facilitates it well. The benefits: employees become more results-oriented and independent. They become adaptive because the market is competitive. Companies that practice this: FormAssembly, Sqwiggle, HelpScout

Time-agnostic work

With a time-agnostic work strategy, employees can choose to work when they want to. Think reaching work to avoid peak hour traffic, think turning 9 am to 5 pm to 4 pm to 1 am – with this strategy, organizations and employees adapt to mutually agreed flexible ways and hours of working. The benefit: this type of work strategy can work in most industries, organizations and situations.

Organizations that allow it: FlexJobs, CloudPeeps

Job sharing

Job sharing works on the strategy of splitting one full-time job into two part time jobs between two people. If factors such as finding the right partner, distributing the work load, easy communication and having the manager’s or supervisor’s permission are taken care of, this strategy can help employees have a fulfilling work-life balance.

Organizations that practice it: US Federal Government, Qualcomm 

So how can employees and HR try to incorporate these practices? Here are some tips to follow.

• For employees, it is important to know where your time flows. Are your after work hours spent glued to a television screen or a phone screen? Is it draining you mentally? Are you getting enough exercise and is your mind getting enough rest? For HR, it could help to provide after work hours recreational benefits to employees, such as free tickets to concerts, memberships at and gyms.
• Make work fun. Employees need to constantly train their minds to avoid getting stressed because of work. If they make work fun, it can have serious positive impact on their wellbeing. Their need for work-life balance might decrease too. HR could contribute in making work fun for employees by incorporating healthy games within work hours. Making work challenges into healthy competitions between teams and by incorporating other such fun ideas.
• Employees must make a note of things and time that is non-negotiable and stick to it. No. Matter. What. If you need an hour in the evening to go for a run, make sure you make it a part of your routine and not let any work affect it. HR too, could create strict rules for employees not to engage in work after hours.

Now that we’ve discussed factors that can be considered in work-life balance, what are you going to practice?