Do You Have Work-Life Balance?

Do you have work-life balance?

Despite the resounding evidence that working long hours can be detrimental to your health and happiness, many still struggle to overcome their deeply-ingrained habits around work hours. The work-life balance quandary has become especially difficult during the pandemic, as the physical boundaries between, work and life have blurred.

The data speaks for itself: A working paper?from Harvard Business School and NYU Stern School of Business that found employees on lockdown spent more time doing work-related tasks. Additionally, an April article from?Bloomberg?reported on NordVPN data that shows US employees were working three additional hours a day during the pandemic.?

Here at Iterable, we believe that working at a company that values work-life balance is important (we'd even go so far as to say its essential). Balance is, after all, one of our four founding company values.

Of course, we know there's a large discrepancy between saying you support work-life balance and actually investing in the infrastructure that will support employees on their quest to find balance.

Here's what we do to create a balanced culture at Iterable:

1. We offer all employees a generous monthly Health and Wellness stipend, that employees can use for anything that contributes to their holistic health and wellbeing. Want to build an at-home Barre studio? Interested in exploring meditative yoga? It's covered by Iterable!
2. If giving back is the key to unlocking your sense of balance, take volunteer time off, or donate to your favorite cause through our Char-iterable program, which endorses paid volunteer time off and matches eligible Iterator donations.
3. A premium membership to Calm, the leading app for meditation and sleep, is available to all employees. Calm guides employees interested in improving their mental health, enhancing sleep quality, and reducing anxiety and stress.
4. With unlimited personal time off and flexible work hours available to everyone, all employees can feel confident and supportive when asking for time away. Feeling under the weather, need to take a mental-health day, or want to take a vacation? Just ask you manager! Need to to run errands, binge-watch the Frozen Disney series with your kids, or take a hike to clear your head? Go ahead, no questions asked (but we might ask to watch Frozen with you).
5. Balancing work and life isn't easy. Sometimes, we need to take an extra day to relax and reenergize. That's why, at Iterable, the first Friday of every month is a company-wide holiday, called Balance Day.
6. We encourage employees to post what they do to relax and balance on our internal #Balance Slack channel. Iterators at every level of the company are encouraged to showcase how they find balance, whatever it may be!

National Relaxation Day

If our #Balance Slack channel is proof of anything, it's that people have very different ways to relax. There are so many variables, including home life, earning power, proximity to support and help, and work role and responsibilities that approaching balance in any one way will most certainly not work for everyone. What balance looks like for a 25-year-old, single and childless software engineer who walks to work in San Francisco will be drastically different from the balance of a 45-year-old single parent with two puppies and a three-hour commute. This is the complexity faced by many companies looking to support work-life balance.

And we're here to help.

In celebration of #NationalRelaxationDay (which, we know, was on August 15), and to support other companies in their quest to implement Balance-focused policies and programs, we asked some of our employees for inspiration and advice.

Our question: "How do you like to relax? How does Iterable enable you to do so?"

The era of near-total self-sacrifice and “working yourself to death” at work is over. Your workplace should recognize the importance of mental and physical well-being and healthy boundaries, and encourage you to relax.

Iterable is growing, and looking for talented, values-driven people to join our team! Explore our open roles, and apply today!