With remote working conditions coming up as a popular work style, many employees around the world may now be adjusting their lifestyles to accommodate working from home as well.
This could also be one of the reasons why work-life balance is also becoming a core focus point for many of these employees. An article published on Forbes.com supports the point that cultivating a work-life balance helps reduce stress and prevents burnout in the workplace.
With numerous benefits to be gained from setting up such an arrangement in your company, how can you as a leader cultivate work-life balance for your employees?
Provide Choices Within Reasonable Means
According to an article published by Fastcompany.com, “Employees don’t quit jobs or organisations. They leave managers and leaders.” As such, how you choose to lead your colleagues is a critical factor when it comes to keeping them satisfied and motivated.
This translates to the idea that providing employees with choices is part of cultivating work-life balance. In this instance, choice implies various levels of privacy as well as spaces.
When employees are less restricted and provided with greater amounts of choice in their working environment, they tend to be better engaged as they find the environment more comfortable to work in.
Tracy Brower, a sociologist working for Steelcase, stated that organisations which embrace choice for workers, have a clear advantage in terms of people who are both engaged and highly effective. With that being said, providing coworkers with choices regarding their working environments or patterns could help leaders to better cultivate work-life balance for employees.
Foster Transparency In The Working Environment
One of the best ways leaders can cultivate work-life balance is by fostering transparency in your working environment. Transparency can only take effect in your company when leaders make channels of open communication available for everyone.
Open communication creates trust, pushes innovation, and cultivates a conducive work environment for everyone. When employees feel that they are being understood, companies will see higher engagement within the workspace and more.
As mentioned in an article published on Atlassian.com, when employees are better able to understand what is happening on their team and why, companies will see higher engagement taking place.
Fostering transparency at your workplace gives employees a clearer picture on their role within the company and how their contribution plays a part in achieving both long and short term goals. As such, opening communication channels up to foster transparency is one way leaders can help to cultivate work-life balance for their employees.
Divide Responsibilities Fairly
Good leaders understand that in order to cultivate work-life balance for employees, a fair distribution of responsibilities is required in their companies.
This means that employers need to do their best to avoid overloading individual employees with too much work. It also requires leaders to help employees monitor and balance their workload where possible. This will enable your coworkers to remain contributing to the company while being able to maximise work-life fulfilment and effectiveness.
An article published by Harvard Business Review says that when leaders create a culture that values productivity over hours worked by openly praising strong performance, employees will be better motivated to get their part at work done. A fair division of responsibilities at work will thus enable leaders to cultivate work-life balance for their employees.
There are multiple ways leaders can cultivate work-life balance for their employees. Some of these methods include providing colleagues choices with regards to their working environment/patterns, fostering transparency through open communication and dividing work responsibilities fairly.
Taking these first few steps can not only help leaders to cultivate work-life balance for employees but also boost organisational productivity, employee engagement and overall success for the company and its workers.
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Reshma is StrengthsAsia’s content writer and research contributor. She enjoys spending her time writing anything from poems to screenplays, and everything in between. She also finds joy in reading novels, baking and catching movies with her family. Participating in creative activities helps her find inspiration and new ideas for her work.
Aly is StrengthsAsia’s marketing and communications guru and lead editor. She's over the top inquisitive and everyone in the company knows her as “The Googler” as she practically googles everything. Honestly, we all worry for her… She is also the Principal Trainer for our one of a kind ice cream team building workshops in Asia.