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How to achieve a perfect work-life balance?

February 16, 2019


A perfect work-life balance requires juggling workplace stress with daily pressures from family, friends and self. Employees today demand a greater control over their lives and a larger say in the structure of their jobs. With our increased dependency on technology and social media, it has also increasingly become difficult to separate work from our personal lives.  

Listed below are few ways of promoting a healthy life-work balance for your employees.

  1. Time off
    • A study by American Sociological Association suggests providing their employees with a larger number of vacations which will lead to a decline in the psychological distress of people. Holidays nowadays are no longer a luxury, instead they have become a necessity. A break from work will give an opportunity to your employees to switch off and enjoy themselves. Vacations are a great way to destress and recuperate and it becomes important that you communicate this idea to your team in order to improve the productivity of your staff so that they have greater focus when they return to the office. An easy way to encourage employees to take time off is by implementing a mandatory system where it is necessary for the staff to use up their complete annual leave each year.
  2. Implementing short breaks
    • Humans are designed not to stare at a bright screen for continuous hours without any downtime. To counter this, it is important to encourage taking small breaks throughout the day by employees. Installing a social area in the office, which can allow people to get away from their desks and hence take their minds off work.
    • Encouraging light exercise as well to break up the day is also a great way to engage your employees in taking a break. Introducing walking meetings outside the office or even a lunchtime running club are few great ways you can engage your employees. Leading companies have nnow started to invite meditation practitioners to run internal seminars, to allow staff to learn the best coping mechanisms for dealing with stress during the period when there is heavy workload on the employees.
  3. Asking employees for guidance
    • The best way to improve employees’ work-life balance is by first asking the employees themselves for inputs. If you see your staff struggling to find balance, then it is best to find out what kind of changes they think would improve their situation. Collaborating with your teams provides more insights into the way they think, feel and process information.
    • Having regular scheduled meetings or implementing real-time feedback programmes are great ways to facilitate these discussions as it will help you to accurately gauge how the employees are feeling and make adjustments to ensure they are provided with the right balance.
  4. Practicing what you preach
    • Telling your teams to leave on time and not over work during the weekend but sending them emails during these period is sending mixed messages and puts pressure on the employees to mirror your working hours. Thus, it becomes important to respect the balance and privacy of employees when they are not in the premise of the office. This ultimately trickles down to the fact that it is best to avoid contacting employees outside work hours in order to allow them to completely switch off, recharge and refresh their minds.
  5. Offering flexible working hours
    • A flexible schedule does not equate to mean that employees can come and go whenever they please, as this is usually an employer’s main concern. However, it does not need to be complicated either. It can be something as simple as introducing the employees to choose their own starting and ending hours in a day.
    • There are more sophisticated flexible schedules such as four-day work week or telecommuting but they require more planning. Having a flexible work schedules are a cornerstone of work balance, therefore they are worth considering.

Striking that perfect work-life balance is a challenge for most employees, however, it is a known fact that balanced employees tend to feel more motivated and less stressed out at their job increasing productivity and reducing the number of conflicts amongst co-workers and management, thus, empowering your employees to take control of their lives as well as work is a quality all offices must have!


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