Over the past few years, the business landscape has become more interconnected, especially since the universal adoption of flexible work arrangements. Since then, it has become challenging to establish a work-life balance between errands, family time, and much-needed 'time-off'.
If your employees are unable to find contentment and value in their jobs, they'll be less productive. Eventually, this will lead to them burning out. This will also leave your business with low engagement which negatively affects the retention rate - which can be pretty costly.
As a result, overall contentment with life, emotional and mental well-being has become more important than ever before. This is made evident by the fact that 33% of employees who have an excellent work-life balance stick to their current jobs, and 85% of businesses that provide work-life balance opportunities report that they are more productive, making it an incredibly crucial motivator.
Why Work-Life Balance Is A Key Motivator For Employees
Businesses spend a lot of time, effort and resources to determine the practical ways to ensure harmony in their workers’ lives.
This is a critical facet of an encouraging work environment where you can help your employees achieve a healthy synergy in their lives, with minimal effort.
For instance, you can help them form a perfect work plan with scheduling software that they can manage from any location. This will also help you avoid unnecessary overtime, which contributes highly to burnout, and ensure they work for scheduled hours only. While the idea of work-life balance may vary for each individual, the approach and definition of work-life balance is ever-evolving. Ultimately, promoting this harmony helps everyone in the workforce, contributes to an empowered workplace and has lasting effects on the productivity, motivation, and health of employees and the organization. Here are more reasons why harmony between their personal and professional lives can encourage, empower and motivate employees:
Work-Life Balance Improves Mental Health
It is essential to maintain good physical health to help one stay energetic. Similarly, a stress-free mind is vital for clear and focused thoughts. Strong mental health allows your team to excel in their personal life and in their careers.
Also, a healthy lifestyle is an excellent stress management solution that helps your workers deal with anxiety, as 25% of employees consider their job to be their number one stressor in their lives.
A healthy work-life balance is essential for employees' mental health. When the right balance is established, they are better positioned to cope with negative thoughts and emotions. They are also more likely to be motivated (and thus more productive) because they have time to dedicate to their mental health outside of work, thus making work less of a factor affecting their mental health. The balance also contributes to a less-stressful work environment.
So, helping your personnel achieve the right work-life fit is integral to maintaining and even improving their mental health. But unfortunately, the challenges of remote work and not being able to draw a line between work from personal time is a threat to their mental health, and the health of your organization.
Thus, it is imperative to encourage your personnel to take a break from their desks, provide resources and support for their mental health and encourage them to keep their diet healthy for the sake of their well-being. For employees under pressure, overworking can be fatal for their physical and mental health. And not addressing these issues on time can lead to chronic illness – all these can affect their decision-making skills and productivity at work.
So, encouraging your employees to take precautions is critical to ensuring an improved work-life balance.
Employee surveys are a great way to connect, communicate and gather sentiment from your employees to ensure they are maintaining healthy practices, and are content with their current work arrangement. Schedule a demo to see how WorkTango's surveys can help your organization.
Strengthens Relationships
Unsociable or long working hours can lead to the breakdown of friendships, domestic relationships, and even employee-employer relationships.
This also means less to no quality time with loved ones. It's pretty demanding to be present and provide others with your complete attention when overwhelmed, exhausted, and even burnt out.
If your employees don't have a proper work-life balance, they might become resentful of their jobs for not giving them time for people who need their support, time, and attention the most. Relationships are one of the most important things to humans, and if your employees don’t have time to give to the people that matter to them most - you need to change that for the sake of your organization, and more importantly the employee.
A synergetic lifestyle helps your employees spend quality time with their friends and family. This has a ripple effect that will make them more optimistic about their career, life, and work relationships because of the sense of fulfillment they get from their personal relationships.
Increases Engagement And Productivity At Work
Motivated employees contribute highly to the business and are the real gems for a company as they drive their respective organizations to success. However, when they have a poor work-life balance, it keeps them from connecting with others at work and negatively affects their engagement. Moreover, fatigue, absenteeism, and burnout are a few problems that can hinder employee engagement.
Therefore, encouraging employees to achieve a healthy balance between life and work is paramount. Better and increased employee engagement will also allow your organization to attract and retain the top talent, emphasizing the importance of an excellent work-life balance.
When your workers feel happy and motivated, they are more likely to be engaged and loyal. They are dedicated to their job responsibilities, ensure they do their best and are enthusiastic about coming to work. Engaged employees significantly outperform their less-engaged peers in almost all regards.
A physically and mentally healthy workforce feels more connected and motivated. And that increased employee enthusiasm means that they are going to be more engaged and will perform at a higher level. This bodes well for employees and employers alike, so ensuring engagement is high should be as important to a business as its bottom line.
Work-Life Balance Facilitates Creative Thinking
Creativity requires space, trust, and ample time. That’s why it’s important to give your people the time to think and not be bombarded by social media, people, phone calls, texts, and emails.
When employees are anxious, overwhelmed, or stressed, they won't have the capacity to think out of the box and creatively. But with a balanced lifestyle comes creative thinking and when the brain takes a break, it’s able to come back and be more effective at problem-solving. This, in turn, means a better and enhanced work product too!
Helping your employees achieve a good work-life balance will help them be more creative and resourceful at work. It will also allow for improved problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making skills!
Brings Greater Levels Of Fulfillment
There is a misconception that professional growth and development have a price and require personal sacrifice. This school of thought believes that you can either have a fulfilling personal life or a career, but not both.
But, in actuality, this isn't the case.
Work-life balance is imperative to ensure a sense of fulfillment and happiness for your employees. The act of balancing is all about being in control of your career path and life, and feeling content along the way. Improving the work-life balance of employees helps them hone their problem-solving skills, enables them to develop excellent organizational skills, and in turn, be more fulfilled in their job because of the increased productivity.
All staff want to achieve work-life balance, and it doesn’t have to come at the cost of personal sacrifice.
Wrapping Up The Work-Life Balance Equation
Today, 72% of employees value work-life balance and consider it essential when searching for a new job. We could see that number climb in the coming months and years.
Now that you understand why it’s important to create this synergy, it’s time to devise strategies for motivating employees and improving your company's bottom line.
Facilitating and empowering your workers helps you in two ways. First, a happy and healthy workforce is better positioned to tackle and overcome the challenges your company faces.
Secondly, you create the basis of a constructive company culture that is a pivotal part of any organization that is good at motivating and getting the most out of its workforce.
Employees must have a good work-life balance to support business initiatives at their highest level. And while this synergy is not just an employer's responsibility, it is on the organization to support employees and put supportive policies in place that put the employee in control of their work and life. You’ll see engagement, productivity, and motivation increase as fewer negative factors influence their career.
Guest post by Derek Jones, Deputy
Author Bio: Derek spearheads key initiatives at Deputy, a global workforce management platform for employee scheduling, timesheets and communication. With a focus on Workforce, Derek helps business owners and workforce leaders simplify employment law compliance, keep labor costs in line and build award-winning workplaces.
