Companies that work their employees too hard and disrupt their work/life balance are moving toward the edge of a precipice. At some point, people just won’t take it anymore.
But long before that, work overloads can cause disorganization and other problems.
To improve work/life balance, make sure to give your employees the following:
1. Reasonable Workload
The bottom line is that any kind of professional needs to keep the job in a certain compartment or box in his or her life. When the job starts to take over, like an invasive plant species, it impacts everything, including that person’s ability to work and make decisions.
This is one of the biggest issues that breeds animosity, rebellion and lack of productivity in the workplace. And it’s something companies have to stay away from if they want to succeed.
2. Family, House, Hobby
A huge number of working professionals have families. Their children rely on them in the off hours when they’re not working – that means efforts to cram more into their inbox will ultimately have a negative effect on the family. Even for those without children, many of them are trying to maintain households. Paying bills, doing home improvements and other things are critical to their quality of life, and also will ultimately affect their ability to do their jobs.
But having a good work/life balance isn’t just for certain kinds of people — it’s for everybody. People need time to develop their personal interests, whatever those may be.
3. Good Leadership
What will inevitably start to happen when people are overloaded is that they will individually start to take steps to protect themselves. Vital tasks will get shuffled from one person to another. Delegation will start happening in a very disorganized and frantic way, one that lots of people can recognize as a warning sign, but many will feel powerless to stop.
With good leadership, companies avoid these issues. But without someone at the helm to enforce work/life balance for their company, everyone suffers. It starts gradually and then quickly spirals out of control as workloads build up.
So how do you maintain a work/life balance?
Part of it is in allocating the right amount of time for tasks that need to be done. Other ways to control work/life balance involve setting mandatory off hours and downtime for professionals.
You may also be interested in this blog post:
6 Ways to Boost Temporary Employee Performance
Have a question? We’re happy to help.
