Research

• Companies that offer a good work-life balance have 25% less employee turnover.
• 85% of companies that offer work-life balance programs for their employees report increased productivity.
• 72% of People Say That While Looking for a Job, Work-Life Balance is something they consider.
• Companies with good work-life balance programs have 50% fewer healthcare costs.
• A Stanford study highlights that their output falls dramatically when employees work 50 hours or more. It plummets after 55 hours. Working 70 hours a week doesn’t produce anything more with the extra 15 hours.

Statement

Enhancers of this driver

• Acknowledging that work is a part of life helps us get the most out of both.
• Setting and communicating boundaries between work and life outside of work.
• Role clarity and good time management.
• Making space in your schedule to decompress.

Detractors of this driver

• A workplace culture where long hours are applauded.
• Increased responsibilities at work.
• Increased responsibility at home, such as caring for children and aging relatives.
• Increased expenses without a salary increase.
• Inability to say no. This can be the most challenging soft skills for any dedicated professional to learn and put into practice.

Individual

• Prioritise your health first and foremost. This will make you a better employee and person. You will miss less work, and when you are there, you will be happier and more productive.
• Develop a roadmap of prioritised initiatives across horizons. Determine which initiatives will have the greatest value and impact.
• Communicate your priorities and what you plan to do over the next week to your boss. Anticipate challenges. Doing this regularly allows you to manage incoming actions and changes in priorities that can occur on a day-to-day basis.
• Spend time thinking about what is important to you in your work and life. How much time do you actually spend on these priorities? Make time for those priorities in advance within your calendar.

Leaders

• Make sure every employee has a specific job description that they helped create. Provide guidelines but let them tweak it. This description should outline daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly responsibilities. Ensure the job description provides the employee with a chance to grow and be rewarded. When employees understand job responsibilities, they will feel calmer and perform better.
• Set clear (or clearer!) goals for your team members. Setting clearer goals gets them going and focus on the critical task at hand instead of doing it their way, which could lead them down the wrong track. This would also mean valuable time lost, the need to redo work or the necessity for you or others to do the work. Clear goals and timelines give your team members peace of mind because they know what they need to focus on and why.
• Employees need to be challenged but not overloaded. The challenge helps employees develop skills, makes work interesting, and helps maintain motivation. Give employees the option of "calling a time out" when they feel overwhelmed. This will help establish a norm around working smarter, not harder. Employees can quickly identify unproductive activities when asked. Asking them periodically will help you keep your operations streamlined.

Organisation

• Have a super clear company vision and communicate this to employees. When employees can see how their efforts fit into the big picture, it is easier for them to focus their energy on helping achieve company goals. Understanding and working toward a shared vision gives work a higher meaning, improves performance, and helps employees manage stress.
• Training managers to become more supportive of family-friendly policies indirectly impacts organisational culture. Conscious overt family-friendly policies can safeguard life balance and well-being.
• Train managers to be supportive. A manager who offers emotional and practical support not only acts as a positive role model but can help their people prioritise and preserve their life balance.

• Don't strive for the perfect schedule; aim for a realistic one. It is important to remain fluid and constantly assess where you are [versus] your goals and priorities.
• Plan weekly your personal and business priorities. If you do not firmly plan for personal time, you will never have time to do other things outside of work.

• Make time to understand what work-life integration means to individual workers and what they need to balance competing demands.
• Be open-minded and creative about solutions for your team. Workshop possibilities and look for strategies that diminish stress and deliver required outcomes.
• Think outside the box - consider all the levers at your disposal. Having a manager who is a creative problem-solver has been shown to increase the retention and productivity of employees.
• Touch base with your employees weekly. In this touch base, your employees should bring their work plan for the following week (and allocated times they plan to carry through on the plan). Doing this enables employees to manage their own time, and manager can easily spot if somebody is overcommitted.

• Train team leaders to have tough and respectful conversations. Many leaders avoid having tough conversations about poor performance or skills deficiencies. Instead, they move to skills coaching or a performance review and avoid the difficult conversation, hoping it will disappear. Having clear boundaries around expectations makes these conversations so much easier.

• Knowing what is important to you is the first step to knowing how and where to set boundaries. Start by asking yourself what limits you need to protect your happiness at work. Ask yourself: “What does that give me? How does it feel when I am operating at my optimal potential?”
• Set and communicate your work hours to your colleagues and customers to have clear boundaries. This should include when you’ll work and when you won’t be available to respond.
• Be ready for boundary breaches. Be prepared for this by visualising a boundary getting crossed, then decide how you will handle that situation. Practise your response - what are you going to say and do? Having a game plan in place helps you to be prepared and avoid being hijacked by emotions.

• Make time to understand relevant workplace policies and promote work and personal life integration and flexible working (aligned with workplace policies).
• Demonstrate good work-life balance practices, as your team is watching your lead. When leaders role model practices for work life integration – it’s good practice and demonstrates the policies are achievable.
• Set boundaries for your employees by clearly defining the employee’s role and responsibilities, which establishes accountability and leaves little room for blame or excuses. Employees should know who they report to, who provides them with feedback, who decides what they should be working on, and who assigns them work. Once the manager sets boundaries, employees can establish and maintain the boundaries more effectively.
• Promote an open-door policy. The first step to supporting work-life balance is creating a culture where trust and two-way communication are valued. The more you encourage employees to discuss their difficulties with you, the easier it will be to help them manage their time and workload.
• Actively encourage your team members to let you know early if things are spinning out of control. Far better to rectify early than wait and have to deal with the consequences.

• Set the code upfront. By having clear codes of behaviour and boundaries around what is and what is not appropriate, everyone can feel safe at work. Obscure boundaries around standards of behaviour see people feeling unsafe and unable to focus on their work. Boundaries help identify what behaviour is and isn’t acceptable for each employee, which helps create a common definition of good behaviour within the workplace.
• Train your managers to tackle stress. At their best, managers track their teams’ pulse and address concerns in a supportive way. At their worst, they may pressure employees or create a negative workplace culture at their worst. In both cases, practical training on managing stress and work-life imbalance will help them develop into the positive leaders they need to be.

• Build in deliberate recovery. Cutting ties with the outside world from time to time allows us to recover from weekly stress and gives us space for other thoughts and ideas to emerge. Unplugging can mean something simple like practising transit meditation instead of checking work emails on your daily commute.
• Take lunch breaks. If you have a lunch break at your place of work, it’s your right to use it. This means you shouldn’t be expected to always eat at your desk and work through lunch.
• Practise self-compassion. One of the most important ways to achieve a work-life balance is to let go of perfectionism. The perfectionism approach may have brought some success during school and early career. However, the stress it causes accumulates over time. The strain on our system and emotional resources increases as our responsibilities increase.

• Engage in conversations about leave plans - support your people in their preferred leave plans.
• Take an interest in your team members’ extracurricular activities. By doing so, you show that you think they are important.
• Sponsor and model deliberate recovery practices - for example mindfulness/mediation, physical movement, regular breaks.
• Allow your team to work for intense periods and then take a break. People naturally go from full focus to physiological fatigue every 90 minutes. Encourage your team to take breaks every 75–90 minutes for 15 minutes.

• Create a culture of trust. Many managers seek to minimise the time employees spend out of the business, believing that their desk time is directly connected to productivity.
• Effective work-life balance support calls for a mentality switch: showing that you trust employees to deliver high-quality work, regardless of where they work from or how long they work. This will get you much further in the wellbeing and engagement game.
• No one size fits all. The recent extension of the right to request flexible working is a step in the right direction, but supporting work-life balance means much more than that. At times, you may need to adapt policies to entire groups of employees, such as parents or carers. On other occasions, you’ll need to agree on solutions informally with individuals; again, a key reason to promote two-way communication within your business.
• Offer a flexible work environment, but remember flexibility means different things to different people depending on life circumstances. Potential arrangements might include working from home, staggered start and finish times, child friendly hours or a change of environment. Be creative in addressing the needs of your crew.