5 Tips for Encouraging Your Team to Better Manage Life Balance & Quality
“If you value your clients, you will value your employees who are either directly or indirectly responsible for servicing your clients.
Treat your employees as you would your clients. This makes employees feel valued and embodies a cohesive unit of client, employee and leadership.”
Skipping lunch, staying up until 1 a.m. finishing a project, taking a call from your boss at the weekend. Sound familiar?
Many companies foster a culture of 24/7 working. If you want to get ahead, you better live to work or find another position. But does working for longer hours always equal greater productivity? According to several studies, no. In fact, quite the opposite.
Exhaustion Blunders
Overwork can lead to mistakes, health problems, and chronic stress. Naturally, there will be times when a tight deadline necessitates answering emails at the weekend, but when work infiltrates every evening and weekend, then it can stop us from getting much-needed rest and conversely lower our overall productivity.
Sleep Deprivation
Insufficient sleep has been officially declared a public health problem, according to the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Over a third of Americans are not getting enough sleep. Our collective tiredness is costing the US economy up to $411 billion a year. It is also costing individual companies thousands to millions of dollars each year. Tired workers are reported to have a “66% rate of lost productivity due to cognitive decline” and suffer from an “inability to focus…losing 5.6 hours of productive time per week”
Poor Life Balance
Being overworked is also the primary reason why people quit their jobs. If you have a top performer, and you regularly give them extra work, you could find that eventually, that person leaves the company. The cost of employee turnover can be high. “Recent research found that the cost of replacing highly-trained employees and executives can easily exceed double their annual salary,” says Content and Community Manager at Bonusly George Dickson.
If you’re managing a team, it’s in the best interest of your company and your employees to ensure that the team has a healthy work/life balance. This doesn’t mean doing less work. It means being more productive during your working hours.
Here are our top five tips for encouraging work/life balance:
1. Focus on productivity not number of hours
An employee may work 80 hours a week, but if they’re exhausted and their work is filled with errors, then they might as well be working 20 hours. Quality is a difficult parameter to measure, but it’s vital to assess the quality as well as the quantity of the work.
Set expectations for every role, measure tasks rather than hours, and make sure to have regular performance reviews to evaluate progress.
2. Encourage micro breaks
Studies of the brain conclude that we can only focus for a remarkably short amount of time, reportedly around 90 minutes. Researchers found that people taking micro-breaks, even of a few seconds, boosted concentration. So encourage your team to divide their day into periods of concentration followed by microbreaks.
Encourage some light exercise as well, to help break up the day. If you have a scheduled phone meeting that doesn’t require screen time, you could turn it into a walk and talk. Consider hosting a company lunchtime yoga or meditation session. If people are working remotely, this could be an online drop-in session.
3. Flexibility
Many of your employees will be juggling work and family commitments. Offering flexibility with time schedules can help them to achieve the right balance of being a working parent. Remote working is becoming a reality for many of us and being able to set your schedule is important.
People may have distractions at home. Being able to prioritize and schedule their own time gives them agency and means that when they are working, they are more concentrated.
4. Watch for signs of burn out
If someone’s struggling to cope with their workload, they may not feel comfortable sharing that with their boss.
Regularly check-in with your team and make sure that they know that they can come to you with any problems. If you notice any behavior that seems out of character, sit down with that person, and talk to them.
5. Lead by example
If you’re the boss and you’re regularly emailing your team at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night, then you are setting certain expectations around their time and what’s expected of them.
Look at how you manage your own time and set boundaries for yourself. You also need to rest and relax in order to perform on maximum brain power.
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