Why should you encourage work-life balance in your team
A much debated topic in the business world, work-life balance is often misunderstood by most people. Work-life balance is about prioritising your professional and personal tasks by scheduling a fair share of the day’s hours towards both. But ‘fair share’ does not mean allocating an equal number of hours for all tasks. It only means assessing how much time a certain task, be it personal or work-related, would take to accomplish and working a schedule around it.
The easiest way to manage a business is to ensure that your employees maintain work-life balance. Let’s take a quick look at why your employees must be granted a good work-life balance.
Image : shutterstock
Fewer burnouts at office
Some stress is common in every job, but occasional burnouts are something serious. When burnouts happen, an employee feels overwhelmed and will fail to meet the never-ending demands of work. Besides work life, a burnout will even impact one’s personal and social lives since one’s mind is never relaxed. When the employee is constantly anxious, their tasks at work are affected and your projects stand the risk of failing.
Improved sabbaticals
Where work-life balance is achieved, sabbaticals can prove advantageous to your business, provided you trust your employees to stay with you once they are back. A sabbatical is ideally requested by employees when they want to travel or take up a vocational course. In the former case, the employee will again return with a fresh mind, better ideas and a better attitude towards their work. In the latter, it will again prove beneficial to your business since the employee will bring their newly-gained knowledge to the table.
Happy employees ensure better yields
When you give your employee the freedom to balance out their work and personal life, they will not only be able to submit the assigned task within the deadline but will also be in a position to take on more work. Making this a habit will only help you get more work done and ensure that your relationship with your client is intact.
Cutting costs
Letting your employee work from home will cut down costs in a range of aspects, like travel expenses, the charges incurred by running an office and so on. A large number of employers across the world are in favour of letting employees work in a flexible environment. A study by the UK National Centre For Social Research (Stephen Woodland, Nadine Simmonds, Marie Thornby, Rory Fitzgerald And Alice McGee) indicates that 94 percent of employers experienced significant benefits from encouraging their employees to strike a balance between their career and personal life.
The best way to run your business efficiently is to understand the needs of your employees. Although it’s good to be a firm boss while getting work done, it also pays to empathise with your employees and be a friend to them.