The Importance of Work-Life Balance: Supporting Your Team's Well-Being

With workers required to work from home and learn how to manage their personal and professional time with little understanding of how to do so, the line between work and life during the Pandemic became very thin. This rapid-fire learning process created a shift in dynamic between what constitutes a good job.

For instance, post-pandemic workers have placed a higher emphasis on a work-life balance when looking for potential employment opportunities. According to research done by Aviva, more workers were attracted to their current role for the work-life balance (41%), and less for the salary (36%), in comparison to rankings gathered in 2019 (40.97% and 41.02%, respectively).

What this essentially means is that employees are searching more for jobs that support their lifestyle, rather than the other way around. In this post, we'll look at what a work-life balance actually looks like with the surprising benefits of maintaining one, and how to improve a work-life balance within your company.

This blog covers,

1. The Surprising Benefits of a Healthy Work-Life Balance

2. Improving Your Company's Work-Life Balance

The Surprising Benefits of a Healthy Work-Life Balance

A work-life balance is a harmonious relationship between your work and personal life. We may talk about a work-life balance as if it's two separate things, but in reality, they're both separate facets of one thing: life. Creating a divide between these two very integral parts of the whole can sometimes seem counterintuitive, because they both serve to support life, creativity, and happiness. Bridging them or connecting them in a way that still shows that separation between them while maintaining the importance of both helps to create this balance in time, energy, and enjoyment. Here are some of the benefits that can be found when this balance is maintained.

• Improved Mental and Physical Health- When workers are able to prioritize their home life with as much emphasis as their work life, giving equal care and attention that they both deserve, they're more mentally prepared to tackle the challenges they're given. Poor balance can lead to both poor mental health in that one inevitably gets neglected, and poor mental health has a drastic effect on physical health. The fact is that there is cross over between home and work; you make lunch at home in order to eat it at work (or make enough money at work so you can free up that time for something else), and make the money necessary to support your family, home, and hobbies. If any of this is disconnected, your mental and physical health goes down the drain.
• More Engagement and Productivity- Similarly, when this balance is met, and the needs of the person's entire world are taken care of, they'll have the ability to engage more proactively in the work and influence the outcome in a positive way. Now, obviously work is not responsible for taking care of the employee's personal life, but there are steps that can be taken to decrease stress that benefit the work culture. For instance, childcare. Single parents are often required to focus on family and work with equal measure and have trouble separating from either. In these instances, as well as less drastic events, it would benefit the workplace to help alleviate this stress in the ways that it can so that employees can come to work and put their best foot forward and remain engaged in the work while they're there.
• Fewer Burnouts- Burnout is a term used to describe the state of being reached when a person is physically, mentally, and emotionally drained from being so overworked that when they do actually get a break, they're unable to enjoy it. Burnout can be characterized similarly to depression, in that there is a lack of motivation and inspiration in creative endeavors. When a person is able to find the balance between work and life, they can gauge better where a break is needed and intuitively decide when to push forward and when they need to refill that "creative well" that their productivity is drawn from.
• Improved Job Satisfaction- By implementing tools and procedures that help maintain a good work-life balance, workers typically show an increase in job satisfaction because that level of burnout is never reached.
• Attracting and Retaining Top Talent- By maintaining a work culture that emphasizes and practices a work-life balance, you show current and potential employees that you're willing to invest in their mental and physical health, which helps retain those workers you've cultivated and attract new talent willing to do the work for a company who cares.

Improving Your Company's Work-Life Balance

Just like any relationship, your work-life relationship takes effort and intentionality to create a harmonious balance. Creating this balance can be difficult, but we're not looking to be better all at once, merely by degrees every day. Here are a few things you can implement in the day that will improve your company's work-life balance now, and in the future.

• Encourage breaks and extended time off- Taking breaks throughout the day, as well as scheduling vacation time to help disconnect from the stress of a job is an effective start to creating a better balance between work and personal life.
• Implement reduced screen time- Staring at screens all day is a fact of the work force today. With the growth and adoption of social media for networking, socializing, advertising, etc., much of the corporate workforce deals with screens for a majority of their day. Taking walks during breaks, encouraging employees to put their screens away for meetings, and offering team-building games during breaks can help create that separation between work and rest. This will go a long way in making those breaks actually work.
• Do a personality test- Everybody is different. Humanity didn't evolve on one linear spectrum. This means that everybody works differently, plays differently, and interacts with the world differently. There are dozens of personality tests to utilize that can give you valuable insight into what the most beneficial avenue for each individual could be. You can learn if a person prefers to work in smaller chunks of time or work straight through a project with one larger break at the end of the day, or any variation thereof.
• Ask employees for suggestions- Your most valuable resource in many areas is your employees. That goes true for this instance. Your employees can tell you more about what they want to see in terms of a work-life balance than some person on the internet can. See what works for them, and what they need from work in order to be able to disconnect from the stress of life. Even if it takes some digging, they'll be able to tell you what they need to do the job with more satisfaction.
• Encourage intentionality at home as well as work- In the corporate world, we look specifically at how life supports work. In this work-life balance post the emphasis has been on how a good balance can benefit the job. However, being intentional at home is one of the best ways to build that balance. By actually taking the time off and unplugging from work, you're able to recharge your ability to focus intentionally on the work. By unplugging from work, you can also actually be the person you need to be for those in your life, father/mother, brother, friend.
• Separate your home and work life- Make sure there is a specific line that doesn't get crossed when working. If life help is needed to be able to focus on the work better, then that's a different story. However, if speaking of home, family, and life problems becomes the distraction, put it away. Learn early on where that line is and stick to it.
• Lead by example- If you preach leaving your computer at work, turning off your phone for work emails after a certain time, and letting breaks be breaks, then you also need to show how valuable those practices can be by doing.
• Use your time effectively- Use time blocking strategies to understand your own abilities and manage your time better. By learning these strategies, you can understand what tasks can be done during a specific time frame and the ability to effectively manage your time will bleed into other areas of your life.

In today's work climate, changing company policies to be more inclusive can be great, but when you lack the central points of that change, it makes the whole process worthless. Instead, focusing on the worker, how they work individually, and what can help them create the balance for themselves can turn the entire company dynamic around in a positive way. By taking the time to learn about the individuals that make up the whole, you'll be able to create a system that works for you and builds that bridge between work and life that can improve your work-life balance and benefit everybody within the company structure.

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About the Author: Anna Taylor

Anna Taylor is a freelance writer and avid researcher- a jack of all trades, but a master of none. She graduated from the University of Hawai'i with an Associates Degree in Liberal Arts because she had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up. She has since found her love of Extended Reality and the possibilities it brings to the world, as well as gardening, cooking, and writing. Anna lives in Interior Alaska with her family.