The key to enjoying a healthy work-life balance in an organisation - a two step guide for SMB owners

The two keys to establishing and enjoying a healthy work-life balance in an organisation are firstly to recognise that you need one, and secondly to recognise that achieving it comes down to how you manage your time.

Only by achieving an appropriate balance will you be able to get the most from working and leisure, and, as Kipling puts it in his iconic poem If,

‘fill each waking minute with sixty seconds-worth of distance run’.

Of course, he’s not advocating jogging, though that will undoubtedly energise some as much as it fills others with horror. He’s advocating fulfilment from work and leisure activities.

Being self-employed offers more control over one’s own destiny, but for people employing others, there is the opportunity to encourage flexible working to incentivise employees.

Streamline processes like expense management

Either way, a close look at business processes is a good place to start when it comes to exploring the possibility of saving time. It’s an area where it’s possible to eliminate waste with no loss of efficiency. Take expense management as an example. Once a time-consuming paper-based exercise, technology has transformed it into an efficient and streamlined operation. At ExpenseOnDemand we’ve been in the business of producing expense management software for almost 20 years. The result of two decades of enhancement is a low-cost, time-efficient app that’s simple and intuitive to use.

It’s fast and accurate (so long as the data added to it is accurate, naturally), copies and even reads invoices and receipts to log date, time, payee, and value, and integrates with widely-used SME business accounting packages including Sage, QuickBooks, Xero and Tally.

The features on offer are numerous, but you don’t have to have them all, picking instead from a list appropriate to your organisation. And those are the ones we’ll charge for. What’s more, our charges factor in how often – or infrequently – you use our app. The less you use it, the less you pay.

Incentivising employees

I'd like to quote our client Arjan Bolwerk?who during our recent webinar said..

"my employees are my assets...if they are happy then our customers are happy"

Employers should start by asking themselves why they employ people. If you’re an employer, are you paying workers to be at their posts for eight hours a day, or are you paying them to achieve a certain amount of work? If it’s the latter, and one must assume it is, then who cares how long they spend at their desks, so long as the job is done in a correct and timely manner?

And if employee roles do require attendance – shop workers, refuse collectors, and motor mechanics spring at once to mind – then look for other routes to incentivisation. All of them need to illustrate that you, as an employer, care about the people working for you.

Take another example of two real companies operating in the UK. One, a family firm which enjoyed increased revenues during the pandemic, nevertheless furloughed staff. When the furlough scheme wound down, the firm decided it could manage without those employees permanently because those who remained had picked up the slack. Result? A series of redundancies, no pay rises for those who remained, and stressed employees probably not working in as dedicated a fashion as they once did.

The other, one of the first companies in the UK to pay the national minimum wage, operates a generous bonus scheme, and offers an extra day off on employees’ birthdays; free holiday home accommodation in company properties; a ￡100 bonus, an extra week’s holiday, and loan of a limo and driver for anyone getting married; a ￡100 bonus for giving up smoking; a day’s bereavement leave on the loss of a pet; and match funding for up to ￡250 of charity fundraising. The result is that the work still gets done, and revenue necessary to cover the cost of the incentives is generated. Employees, feeling rewarded, are happy to put in the effort. More importantly, the incentives enhance their work-life balance.

That’s a lot to take in. Start with looking at our expense management app as a cost effective and product efficient solution?(Prices start from GBP 1/USD 1/EUR 1/AUD 2/INR 35). Click here to get started:?https://www.expenseondemand.com/get-started?.

Start your?free trial today?or?book a demo

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The writer has founded ExpenseOnDemand with a vision to enable companies to lead a paperless and a hassle-free business process by offering a smart, simple, & intuitive expense management solution.

Sunil NIGAM?bolstered the technology base & aced the business model to make solutions affordable to everyone – at $1/user/month, making it the most trusted cloudbased application by SMBs of over 96 countries..and perhaps the best expenses app in the universe!

Find out more on?https://www.expenseondemand.com/expense-management-software /?

or follow?ExpenseOnDemand's official LinkedIn page?to keep yourself updated on 'the best expense management app in the universe!'