Sometimes it’s hard to see the beginning of the year as a time of growth. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the looming debts of the holidays and the pressure of New Year’s resolutions. Stress and overwhelm can easily affect your employees’ work performance as well as their personal lives.

Check-ins are a useful way to connect with your employees and gauge where they’re at. Making your employees feel supported in their work environment helps to manage those everyday stresses, support a healthy work-life balance, and as a result, increase productivity.

While there are no doubt many benefits to having healthy and balanced employees, the process does look different for everyone. Some find balance in sitting at home with a book, while others find balance climbing up mountains to watch the sunset. Whatever it looks like to you, it is important that you consciously import some sort of work-life balance into your everyday structure and that of your employees.

So, how do you—as an organization—actively support your employees in implementing work-life balance into their daily schedules? Here are a few tips!

  1. Encourage your employees to take breaks. Sometimes workloads and team pressure can be overwhelming, and taking a quick 5 minutes can help an employee find focus and feel supported by the team.
  2. Try to allow time during the workday for team development and activities. Doing team development and activities outside of company time isn’t a bad thing, but it can overwhelm employees and make them think that they have to choose between personal and work commitments.
  3. Try to look at and review each employee’s workload as regularly. When an employee feels like they have an achievable workload, their productivity increases.
  4. Watch out for burnout. Part of your responsibility is to look after your employees’ well-being, in addition to just their job performance. Chances are, your employees aren’t going to admit to you directly that they’re feeling overworked or stressed. This means that most of the time, it will probably be up to you to recognize when your employees need more balance. Signs of burnout can include excessively calling in sick, increased error rates, and clear physical exhaustion. If you spot an employee who might be burning out, suggest they leave early one day or try to avoid giving them extra projects for a bit.
  5. Facilitate a conversation around flexible schedules. Having open, honest conversations about your needs and your employees leads to effective/productive solutions. Those conversations may include flextime, a compressed workweek schedule, job sharing, and other creative options.

These are five of our top solutions to help you and your employees achieve work-life balance. If you don’t know how to facilitate these conversations with your employer/employees, Key Instincts can help!

Contact us at www.keyinstincts.com today!

 

company alignment company culture core values engaging others effectively fundamental beliefs of a company healthy organization sense of belonging success of a company