11 Ways to Improve a Healthy Work-Life Balance

Career & WorkplaceGuest Posts

Are you getting overwhelmed by workplace stress and the pressure of family and friends? A positive work-life balance can help you create more time for your work and other things in your life. The busier you get, the harder it is for you to prioritize between your work and personal life. Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is essential because it improves your overall health and relationships. It also enhances your productivity and attitude toward new work-life challenges.

Despite the pressure to have it all, it is not easy to achieve and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Here are 11 ways to make that improvement.

Employee attendance tracking for a healthy work-life balance

It is a good idea to avoid conflict at work. Fortunately, there are tools and effective work-life management strategies that allow you to reduce the effects of stress. Likewise, these tools can be used to strengthen the workforce in your organization, which will boost the productivity of your employees.

One of the benefits of using employee attendance tracking is that it allows the manager to embrace remote working. Attendance tracking apps have a remote clocking feature that allows your employees to be accountable without restrictions. Besides, these attendance tracking tools can help your team become more productive and improve morale. By reducing the time it takes to wait for vacation and time-off approval, employees become productive, and the work environment becomes happier.

By far, one of the most critical benefits of attendance tracking is the ability to identify goals and objectives by reviewing imbalances in hours worked. The big picture in this insight is the identification of payroll savings and better decision-making. Both are important because they allow the manager to identify and act on the activities that are eroding the company’s culture.

How to Improve a Work-Life Balance?

Unfortunately, many people don’t place enough importance on their mental health. The importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance is prevalent at a time when studies show that stress-related illnesses and depression are on the rise. Money can create happiness some times, but spending all your time working pushes you further from happiness. Here are 11 tips to help you improve work-life balance.

  1. Meet the needs of your employees

Employees are the lifeblood of any organization. So if you are not meeting their needs, then you are bound to increase your work-related stress. Here are tips for fostering better mental and physical health of your team:

  • Provide child care perks
  • Ensure your employees take paid leave
  • Survey balance-related factors
  1. Educate your staff

Unfortunately, small business doesn’t spend as much to educate their employees on better work-life balance as large organizations. For a business to succeed, the employees have to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Offer seminars on how work-life balance is important and how to achieve it.

  1. Lookout for employee well-being

If you want to improve work-life balance in your organization, look out for employee well-being through social support. That’s a sound business decision, and companies around the world are acknowledging it. Why? The reason is that employee well-being is linked to engagement and productivity.

  1. Make working hours flexible

Herein, employees have scheduling freedom that allows them to fulfill the obligations of their positions on their own time. Flexibility has countless benefits to organizations, and a lot of companies are taking note. This is an excellent way to encourage work-life balance outside the office environment.

  1. Embrace remote working

Your employees don’t need to dress in company attire and commute through traffic to work to stay productive. There are a lot of benefits of remote working to businesses. Most importantly, the employees are more productive and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

  1. Promote quality over quantity

As a business manager, you should encourage your employees to work efficiently instead of doing more work. Doing more work and working smart are not the same. Besides, doing a lot of work damages the morale of the employees.

  1. Bring them home to work

Maintaining a healthy balance between your work and personal life is no easy task. That’s why many organizations encourage employees to carry their work home. This approach allows the employee to spend more time with their family, which also makes them happier.

  1. Encourage employees to practice healthy living

It is no secret that employees are the best asset an organization holds. Hence, placing a deeper emphasis on employee wellness can encourage engagement in the workplace and improve productivity. Also, an integral aspect of promoting a healthier work-life balance is healthy living.

  1. Prioritize financial education

Financial stress can have a deep impact on employees’ performance away from home. As such, improving the financial literacy of your employees can have far-reaching implications in your company’s success.

  1. Promote creativity

Encouraging your employees to be more creative can spur innovation within your organization. Therefore, promoting a healthy work-life balance through creativity can lead to an actively engaged workforce.

  1. Lead by example

Even when you tell your employees that you encourage healthier living, that doesn’t mean they’ll follow everything you say. You have to lead by example if you want to connect with your staff. If your employees see that you value healthier foods over other junk options, they will prioritize theirs.

Bottom line

There are a lot of ways to separate your personal and professional lives without having them encroach on each other. Which one are you looking forward to implementing most?

Author’s BIO: Lori Wade is a journalist from Louisville. She is a content writer who has experience in small editions. Lori is now engaged in news and conceptual articles on the topic of business. If you are interested in an entrepreneur or lifestyle, you can find her on Twitter & LinkedIn. She has good experience and knowledge in the field. 

Workplace Stress And Health

Career & Workplace

workplace stress and health
We are at the beginning of the flu season and you know the drill: wash your hands frequently, cough into your elbow, clean surfaces, get a flu shot…stay healthy. In the workplace, illness affects more than the one feeling sick because you are faced with staying home or spreading germs. It’s a tough call, because we are surrounded by invisible invaders bringing illness all the time.
Stress is known to weaken our ability to fight those invaders. I am a huge believer in this. The minute I feel overworked or overwhelmed, my throat starts hurting. Since we spend most of our time at work, stress in the workplace can be a huge factor in whether or not we get sick. Keeping the stress down will help us stay healthy. Question is, how do we do that?

  • You can only control what you are able to choose. You might not have a choice about where your desk is, but you do have a choice about keeping it clean. Air quality is usually beyond your control, but you might be able to have a plant that helps purify it, and you certainly can take walks outside. Grouchy co-workers might dump on you, but you could use that to look for ways to make things better.
  • Decide now what the holidays will look like, and be realistic about what you do and why you do it. Don’t plan for “perfection.” Plan for flexible family time and let the mishaps become stories you will laugh about next year. What holiday work commitments will be expected? Do you know how to handle gift giving in the corporate world? It might seem early to talk about it, but you will have less stress if you know what to do.

Remember that stress is not bad in small doses. It’s like exercise for your soul in a lot of ways. The problems come when stress is accumulated upon stress and doesn’t stop. Figuring out how to keep that stress an occasional workout will keep YOU healthy and at work.

Stress In The Workplace — What You Can Do

Career & Workplace

stress in the workplace -- what you can do
Stress in the workplace is universal, but there are things that you can do to alleviate that stress and channel it into good energy. Here are a few suggestions that can help you take control of the situation to your benefit:
Realize that you only have control of your own stuff. 

  • You can do something about your desk or area of responsibility.
  • You can do something about the way you respond to a situation or the things you tell yourself.
  • You can’t force someone else to act the way you wish they would.

Do a good job with the stuff you have control over. 

  • Keep your work area picked up and functional. It doesn’t have to be sterile, but make it calm by putting away the clutter & paring the accessories down to one or two things that you really enjoy looking at. You can switch them out as often as you like but only display the minimum.
  • Focus on doing your job well and being friendly without drama. Don’t gossip or backstab; think of your coworkers as future referrals for your next job and act accordingly.
  • Take advantage of training sessions, assessments, and improving your job skills. Get job counseling and expand your horizon to include working toward a different job if that’s what you’d like to do.
  • Own your mistakes. Stop the blame game in its tracks by acknowledging when you blew it and put the emphasis on fixing the problem and going on.
  • Take a walk instead of reaching for the snack. Replace unhealthy coping skills with healthy ones and use the energy from that stress reaction for exercise.

Let the coworker deal with their own stuff because you can’t do it for them.

  • If you work with a chronically angry person, you probably are not the source of their anger. You just are there to dump on. If you can, avoid giving them an opportunity to dump on you. If it isn’t possible, imagine an open garbage bag they are dumping into and toss it when they are done.

If your workplace is truly intolerable, focus on leaving as soon as you can with good references from this job. Don’t burn any bridges by bad behavior and do what you can to keep your stress level down. This is great motivation to research career options, develop a strategy, and look for another job armed with all the skills you can develop.
Stress isn’t caused by a situation; it’s caused by our reaction to a situation. Your body goes into the same type of stress mode with any intense situation, from athletic competitions to scary movies to roller coasters to the workplace. Taking control of what you can will keep that stress positive for you and your career.