Welcome to LIFE BALANCE
Awareness of Work Life Balance
Work-life balance is one of the most critical areas that need to be focused on for a happy workforce.
As leaders or managers, you need to be aware that only a workforce ?with the right work-life balance has a better chance of sustainability.
Work-life balance has to be part of the organizational policies where it has clear guidelines on?the expected work hours of an employee.
While there can be occasional exceptions, there should not be a case where organizations?extend the work so the employee is unable to pay attention to his life.
Furthermore, organizations need to keep a close track of what the employees are doing within their work hours and if they are achieving the expected outcomes within their job hours.
Work-life balance can be due to many reasons. While some of it could be aspects of improvements from an organization’s standpoint, there are a few other aspects that is purely dependent on the employee, and these have to be improved from an employee standpoint.
The first aspect in achieving work-life balance is to create awareness among employees on the work life balancing aspects. Furthermore, organizational policies, goals and strategies have to be developed keeping in mind the aspects of the work-life balance.
Awareness can be created by circulating communications and creating awareness campaigns within the organization to help the employees understand how employee work-life can be achieved.
Furthermore, people managers need to be educated on the controls they need to adhere to when?assigning work.
Some companies even have a stick 40-hour rule extended due to an organizational shortcoming, then such can also complain.
While some organizations have all policies, some managers or leaders do not adhere to such. In such instances, employees could make very complaint of such to outside authorities such a labor tribunal etc.
Therefore, as a leader or manager, you need to be very firm in practicing work-life balance and should be an agent of change and advocate of it and prove it by your actions.
This will help sustain good employees who are happy and live a balanced life, which will eventually be a win for both the organization and the employee.
Effective usage of time
Time is a minimal resource. Practical usage of time has a direct impact on having a work-life balance.
This could be an effective usage of office time for office work and personal time for personal work.
While employees are required to work on an 8 to 5 job mostly 5 days a week, some organizations could be having a job roster per the nature of it could also be a part-time job.
However, organizations have put in place a minimum hour of work to compensate their employees.
The key to achieving work-life balance is ensuring employees are giving their hundred percent focus during the work hours. Unless employees are fully focused, they will become less likely to achieve the expected outcome.
?If such occur, there is a very high chance that the employee is losing his work-life balance due to they need to be putting in extra hours of work to complete a job that they are supposed to do within their job hours.
On the other hand, this could have many indirect cost impacts on organizations due to excessive resources consumption. While with the work from home conditions, this has reduced to some level, this can harm the other employees too.
Simply because many tasks within an organization are interlinked, if one person fails to complete their job on time, all the others who are directly or indirectly dependent on it could also be working extra time and putting extra effort to complete and cover up a delay of one person.
Therefore, ineffective usage of time can have so many substantial impacts on an overall organization.
On the other hand, when the employee misses the family time, it could lead to many other challenges too, and they will soon start to lose focus on the job.
A sound mind is essential for a good outcome. Ineffective usage of time, on the other hand, can be the key for a non-sound mind, and employees may eventually be rushing things off to meet deadlines.
As a leader or manager, you need to ensure that you take the necessary steps to ensure the work-life balance is maintained at work by the practical usage of time by the employees.
?If this is not achieved due to an issue from the employee or due to an indirect impact on another employee, such needs to be addressed immediately for the grater benefit of the overall organization without any delays.
Cross Training
Cross-training of resources can help organizations achieve work-life balance in a more indirect perspective.
By effective cross-training of resources, organizations can effectively cut down the dependability they have on each employee.
In the event of an emergency, organizations will always have the ability to seek the support of another employee to cover up a given task.
Furthermore, sudden market conditions may require an organization to stretch more than what they usually do.
In such cases, when multiple resources are available, organizations can effeiciently distribute the work to multiple employees without burdening the work for one person.
The more independent an organization is from an individual, the more it will become a win for both the given individual and the organization.
As leaders or managers, you need to take cross-training as an wide organizational initiative to ensure it is done effectively for all the possible roles.
On the other hand, some roles can have some challenges on cross-training resources due to their nature, complexity and skill scarcity.
In such cases, at least it is recommended organizations have resources shadow such critical resources to get at least an idea of how the job is done.
This will be somewhat helpful than not knowing anything. At least by this, in the event of a personal emergency for such an individual, another person will be able to carry out the job with some supervision from the person responsible for it.
Organizations need also to have a mechanism to recognize resources that are good at multiple streams or areas as they can be critical to an organization for sustainability.
Therefore, organizations need to take necessary actions and strategies to ensure, such resources are not overburdened. Sometimes, this may automatically happen because they are good at various things: all such tasks may lead to them.
There has to be a proper control done and supervision to ensure all the resources are not overburdened and specialized resources are overburdened for the simple reason of them being very successful in the completion of any tasks that are assigned to them as it can put them in a very unfair situation where they are tasked more and more as they continue to deliver resulting better outcomes.
Paid time-offs
Paid time off are essential in bringing a good work-life balance to employees. Sometimes, employees may be reluctant to take some additional offs even though they are stressed out due to their excessive work.
Paid time offs are something that could employers promote to encourage employees to take time off in the event they are stressed out.
There are different types of schemes organizations could effectively adopt in coming up with adequate paid time offs for the most deserving employees.
Some paid off could be structured in a way they are earned due to some continuous work conditions. For example, a company that generally has a 8-hour shift is expecting an employee to work on 9 hours shifts for 5 days continuously, making them eligible for a paid time off of a day to compensate them for their efforts and hard work.
By doing this, employees are recognized for the extra mile they go or the extra efforts they put.
On the other hand, there can be some paid time offs organizations could give to help people with essential moments of their life such as their anniversary, Paternal leaves etc.
By doing this, organizations are giving employees more chances to give themselves a break. This is very important for employees because a proper break could always help employees to improve their effectiveness. Too much work and stress could cut down the employee creatively and many other aspects, resulting in less of greater outcomes.
Furthermore, this also gives employees motivation to look forward to a good rest after a stressful stint.
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Such expectations could always help them motivate them to do their best as they know they are rewarded in the end for what they put tother.
While there can be many statutory guidelines organizations need to keep complaints to a minimum, organizations always recommend doing a little more than the basic compliances to create a positive outlook within employees.
On the other hand, as leaders and managers, you need to make sure employees are aware of their entitlements and ensure employees make use of what they are entitled to.
It is very important that employees use these as its both beneficial for them and the organizations.
Organizations need to set the mindset among employees that leaves, and time offs are encouraged by management, and there has been some KPIs to measure a good work-life balance too to ensure employees to see this as something positive.
Corporate Initiatives
There are many corporate initiatives organizations can encourage for employee betterment and work-life balance.
Employee wellness is another area organizations need to put more focus on. Employee wellness means both physical wellness and psychological wellness too.
Such initiatives need to be organization-wide, and it has to be driven?on a more like a top-down approach.
It is an essential to have a healthy workforce as it can support an organization in many aspects.
While the benefits are not directly reflected, the indirect benefits of such can be identified.
A workforce that is fit and healthy both physically and psychologically and proven to produce good results. Healthy individuals could be active, and they generally are not lazy.
Furthermore, when they are psychologically sound, they can put their entire focus on the work they do.
While employees can have different levels of focus, there is not much an organization can do for a person if he is not super focused.
An employee who is with a general or average focus could complete a task per expectations. However, someone who is super focused is capable of producing exceptional results.
While organizations could take actions against employees who are not focused, there is not much an organization do: if people are not super focused, that is above the minimum expectation.
On the other hand, when employees put in more than their best, that would quickly result in organizations achieving success quite fast as the outcomes and generally proven to be exceptional.
It is essential the organizations take this lead because many a time employees tend not to give importance to these aspects as they are busy with their work. They are even reluctant to do their daily workouts as they are busy with their work.
When it’s run at a company level and even if the leadership is taking part?in those activities employees would automatically be motivated to participate as their leaders encourage and influence their decision-making process.
As leaders or managers, you need to ensure that you take all required steps and investments to run such initiatives at a company level for your organization to be a responsible organization that is concerned with the well-being of their employees both physically and psychologically.
Outcome based KPIs?
Traditionally, organizations had KPIs set for employee time, attendance, punctuality and many other aspects that did not have much effect on an outcome.
Coming on time to work has been a critical KPI for assessment. However, in recent times, things have changed to a level where organizations are now very much focused on the output of an employee, irrespective of how punctual they are or if they come to work every day.
Generally speaking, KPIs need to be always outcome-based. This is simply because what matters most to an organization is the outcome a person achieves. Whether or not they achieve it, by being punctual or not, or if they come to work or not, does not really matter much.
As a leader or manager, our recommendation is to ensure your KPIs are always measured by the outcome and not any other aspects that are not very relevant to an output.
When KPIs are set this manner, employees will have a lot of flexibility when it comes to achieving their set targets and it can also give them a good work-life balance.
The flexibility of the workplace has a lot to do with the worklife balance of the employee.
As a leader or manager, you should make a substantial contribution to understand which of the employee goals are meaningful and has a direct link to the output.
Remote working is one such area where it can be provided as flexibility to the employee if they have some personal commitments where they require themselves to be present at their homes due to some reasons like childcare or parental care.
On the other hand, some jobs require a person to perform a specific task at a given location. For example, if we take a job of front-line customer care executive, they may have to be present physically to greet customers. In this case, there is only a little an organization can do in achieving flexibility.
Organizations need to spend some quality time reviewing their KPIs and goals to understand which aspects of a KPI or a measurement align with the outcome, and which are not.
Whatever is not directly resulting for an impact to the output and if they are keeping things inflexible to an employee, you need to ensure you take these aspects off from the KPIs.
While each organization has different business models and ways of doing things, each may approach this problem differently to the others.
Therefore, the key takeaway from this section is always to ensure that the KPIs are set in a manner relevant and avoid making those unnecessarily inflexible. Always focus on the outcome and allow the employees to work it in a way they are comfortable of in achieving the outcomes.
Flexibility
As explained in the above section, flexibility is an aspect each organization needs to focus on to achieve the desired outcomes.
Each job and nature of business have a different level of flexibality to achieving the set objectives.
However, flexibility is an element that is tightly integrated with trust. Trust is generally a two-way thing. It has to be from both employers to employee and vice versa.
Trust is the key for a organization in rolling out flexible work culture. The flexibility of work can vary in multiple aspects and areas.
Flexibility, in general, can be of working places, working times, delivery quality, availability and many other aspects.
For example, working times could be made flexible if the job does not require a person to start at a given time and finish off at a given time. Furthermore, working places could be flexible if a?job does not require a person to be at the office for a specific work. Then again, this depends on the type of work.
On the other hand, deliverable quality is also something that an organization could be flexible with, where for each task, if there is a set quality that needs to be met at a minimum, anything above that quality could be an acceptable delivery. This may vary from each product and service a company offers and each industry to the line of business.
Furthermore, the flexibility of availability could be identified as how important for a specific person to be present for a specific job. As we discussed before, with cross-training, the availability aspect of the employees could be made flexible. For an example, if a meeting requires some individual mandatorily, and if that individual can not make it for some reason like a personal emergency, then an organization can easily assign some other employee for this job, and this could offer some flexibility to all the employees too.
The fundamentals takeaway from this area is that organizations need always to make sure they put their primary focus on things that are important and worthwhile to be focused on.
If there is room for organizations to offer some flexibility to their employees, organizations need always to take steps and best efforts to offer such flexibility for the employees.
On the other hand, organizations need to create the required awareness for the employees to clarify how trust and reliability are a key driver for organizations to consider flexible.
This is a two-way thing, and both organizations and employees need to put their best efforts together to make it work as it will be a win-win situation for both parties.