We’ve all been there: you’re out watching a movie with friends, at a family dinner, or maybe just sitting at home alone, and you get that text message. It’s from your boss asking if you could just check up on something, just super quick and easy. Next thing you know, it’s 10 pm, and you’ve got twenty Chrome tabs open while you’re sitting there wondering just how much sleep you’re going to get that night.
In our digital world, it’s become harder than ever to leave work at the office. Smartphones have made it easier than ever to take all those work emails home with you, making your home feel more like, well, where you work. At Payday HCM, we’ve had numerous clients come to us wondering how it is they can ensure their employees know that they’re not that — that once five o’clock hits, we’re all off the clock. It’s a tricky task, but it’s one we’ve embraced time and time again when crafting benefits packages.
In this article, we’ll go through just what exactly work-life balance means and how you, as an employer, can ensure you’re securing this balance for your employees. We’ll look at the kinds of things that a good benefits package includes that can demonstrate your business’ commitment to maintaining their lives outside of work.
In this article you will learn:
- What Work-Life Balance Means
- Why Work-Life Balance is Important
- How to Incorporate Work-Life Balance into a Benefits Package
What Does Work-Life Balance Mean?
Before we can start to talk about ways that you can help support work-life balance in your business, we first need to understand what it is. While the term can be relatively self-explanatory, many factors come into play when looking at what affects work-life balance.
The Balance of Personal and Professional
Put very simply, work-life balance is the balance between your work and personal life. This includes time spent in and out of the office as well as leveraging how much contact you have with work when “off the clock.”
Well, it’s easy then: just don’t check your email after you leave work. And, yes, in a way, it can be that simple, but for many, the factors that can affect work-life balance go beyond just late emails from your boss. Your work environment, coworkers, and even the type of work can all play a role in maintaining work-life balance.
Technology is Great, But…
It does lead to some issues, especially regarding work-life balance. Forbes points out the ideas of being “always on” and the increased level of connectedness regardless of location as key issues affecting work-life balance in our current age.
As helpful and useful as technology has been in creating a more efficient office space for everyone, it has also presented a unique set of challenges for human resource managers and supervisors everywhere.
The Importance of Work-Life Balance
Now it may be very easy to read the sentence “The Importance of Work-Life Balance” and think, “duh, I know it’s important. I know I don’t want to be at work all the time.” But beyond the obvious implications, it is important to unpack work-life balance and how it can impact your business.
Lack of Work-Life Balance and Its Impacts
First and foremost, maintaining a healthy work-life balance is important for maintaining one’s own and one’s employees' health. According to the National Library of Medicine, there is a direct correlation between adverse health effects and poor work-life balance. These impacts affected both employees’ physical and mental health.
Chronic stress can lead to worsening health complications like heart disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. You also risk employees becoming burnt out with their work.
Effects on Productivity and Employee Satisfaction
Work-life balance is essential for ensuring your business performs at its highest caliber. Employees who achieve a healthy work-life balance are more engaged, productive, and committed to their jobs. This can lead to improvements in employee retention and help to decrease employee turnover.
Businesses that prioritize work-life balance tend to see improvements in overall productivity. More focus, fewer mistakes, and higher-quality work directly result from improved work-life balance.
Your Role in Ensuring Work-Life Balance
Now that we know what work-life balance is and the effects it can have on the workplace, how do you actually go about improving it? Luckily, there is a long list of solutions at your disposal that will help you create a more positive work environment. These include:
- Flexible work options
- Mental health resources
- Employee wellness programs
- Paid family and medical leave
Flexible Work Options
Flexible work arrangements are almost industry standard after the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a reason for that: offering your employees the option to work from home can give them the freedom to work how they want, increasing job satisfaction and limiting stress.
There is a balance, though. A study published in the journal Human Relations found that actual face-to-face interaction between employees can also improve the work environment. Striking the right balance between remote and face-to-face work is crucial in fostering work-life balance for your employees.
Mental Health Resources
Mental health in the workplace is another important topic. Helping to manage stress from employees’ work and personal lives is crucial in cultivating work-life balance.
Including an employee assistance program in your benefits package can be a huge step toward providing your employees with the help they need. Ensuring the company's health insurance plan covers counseling services and mental health treatment is also key.
Employee Wellness Programs
Including employee wellness programs in your benefits package is another great way to help employees improve their work-life balance. Offering something as simple as a gym membership can boost employees’ physical health.
Wellness programs can play a crucial role in employee retention. According to the Harvard Business Journal, an employee wellness program can establish trust throughout an organization and help employees feel valued.
Paid Family and Medical Leave
Another way to help employees improve their work-life balance is to offer paid family and medical leave. According to the Center for American Progress, this can take a few different forms, including:
- Medical leave
- Parental leave
- Caregiving leave
- Deployment-related leave
- Safe leave
While something like medical leave might be common, providing employees with a significant amount of time in tandem with lesser-offered options like safe leave, paid leave can help to boost your benefits package and keep employees happy.
Finding the Balance
Striking the right balance between your own professional and personal life is a difficult task, let alone helping someone else do it. But in finding ways to offer various solutions to your employees, you not only can help them find that balance but you might help yourself as well.
As the nature of work continues to evolve, the pursuit of work-life balance will remain essential. Ensuring your benefits package tackles this issue is key. Learn more about how Payday HCM can help you craft the best benefits solution for your company.
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