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Work-life balance is one of the most important elements of a healthy work environment. Maintaining a work-life balance helps people to become more productive, reduces stress and burnout. If you have unhealthy habits about working, it can lead to physical consequences such as chronic aches and heart problems.
An unhealthy life causes more stress and it creates a negative cycle. Stress and work become the same word if you can not change the circumstances. Too much stress over a long period of time leads to a negative impact on mental health too, causing a higher risk of depression, anxiety, and insomnia.
The Mental Health Foundation of UK formed a survey on the subject demonstrates why:
- 1 in 3 feel displeased about the time they devote to work
- %40+ neglecting other aspects of life
- Working long hours makes %27 of the employees feel depressed, %34 feel anxious and %58 feel nervous.
The survey also indicated that as weekly hours increase, negative feelings such as unhappiness, stress, and anxiety rise as well.
Lack of work-life balance directly affects how employees work and behave at the workplace. Which eventually affects the quality of the product or service. Therefore, maintaining a healthy relationship between work and life inspires a more productive workforce. When work-life balance is achieved, benefits can include:
- Better levels of efficiency
- Lower levels of stress
- Motivation
- Improved customer service
- Higher connection with work
How to Create Work-Life Balance
It can be difficult to recognize when you need to restore your work-life balance. If you faced situations in your life where you have felt like work has started to take over too much and it is challenging to complete your tasks, you should set healthy boundaries around work. Creating a work-life balance is an ongoing process. You will be learning and adapting as your interests, workload, and stress levels change over time.
Here are some practices you or your employees can adopt to ensure they get the balance right.
1. Plan Your Day
To maintain a work-life balance, you must allocate and schedule your workload in advance. You do not have to deal with remaining work in your spare time when you plan what to do according to your daily, weekly, and monthly schedule. If you plan ahead, there will be no situation where work interrupts your family/friend time. But, how can you manage your plans and projects easily and quickly, without them becoming another piece in your workload?
First, use task management tools whether teams or individual work. With the determined contents and deadlines, everyone can construct their own plan. At the same time, knowing what tasks are priority or which days are the busiest will be very important and useful when planning time for off-work. PeerBie provides you with all the necessary tools to create a better work-life balance.
Employees or managers can get lost in completing small and low-priority tasks which affect their personal life. For example, if you keep spending time on small tasks -without a plan- you may have to miss loved ones birthday since there will be work you need to complete as soon as possible.
Assign deadlines, specific importance and send all the needed files within one platform. ‘To-Do Lists’ by PeerBie allows you to plan yours as well as your entire team’s work. Different tasks can be assigned to different people on the same team.
PeerBie also shows who is active and working with ‘Daily Dashboards’. As a manager or team member, you can see at what time employees log into the system, what tasks they will complete, and how long they have worked at the end of the day. Manage the process without the need for more applications, tabs, or communication, especially for team projects.
2. Manage Your Time
Create a timeline of your personal activities and work. Put dates and keep little notes about the activities, breaking each task into components.
You can customize your own timeline with an Excel spreadsheet or simply, keeping an agenda. However, it is not sustainable and creates more work for you to deal with.
Use the same application from your desktop or phone – with PeerBie you can manage both work and personal activities within the same platform. Special calendar-view allows entire time planning to be arranged digitally. Keep your work-life activities balanced.
3. Set Work Hours
You may find yourself distracted if you work until midnight, every night. It will create a problem for your work-life balance.
Knowing how much time you spend organizing your day accordingly will protect you from feeling burnout, which you may experience later. With PeerBie’s reports feature, you can access the time you spend daily, weekly and monthly in the form of a document.
PeerBie also creates special time reports with its designed algorithms. Evaluate the time you spend without tracking it additionally.
Especially, as a manager, using PeerBie prevents problems that may occur in your project management. You do not have to follow and record the activity of team members with pen and paper. It is very easy to give feedback with the performance reports that PeerBie offers you.
4. Take Breaks
Did you know that even a 30-second break can improve concentration and reduce stress? Breaks will allow your brain to consolidate and retain learning.
Remember to take breaks throughout your day. Working more does not mean working efficiently. Getting up and stretching every 15 minutes will make you more focused and productive.
5. Take Advantage of Technology
Do not take long trips that gets you stuck in traffic to attend a meeting. If you are working remotely, use conferencing technologies. Protect your work-life balance by using project, team, and time management applications.
You can schedule online meetings and participate with PeerBie. Instead of chasing different communication applications and dealing with meeting links, you can organize your Zoom meeting via PeerBie.
Did you have a conflict about a project? Just open PeerBie and ask directly the responsible employee with the one-on-one chat feature.
Do you need to do budget planning as a team? Create a group chat with PeerBie ad discuss the issue in your department’s own social wall by composing a text.
Plus, stay in touch with your customers with external communication channels. Form separate channels to communicate with the people you work with from a different company.
6. Make a Comfortable Workspace
Invest in equipment that will support you while you are working. It can be headphones, a comfortable chair, or a mini laptop. Whatever works for you.
If you are working remotely, try to have a room or a corner where you customize the area for work. Separating the space you work will benefit your work-life balance.
7. Ask, Take Advice and Learn
Do not feel obligated to know everything or tie yourself to being the one who knows everything. Having too much responsibility will cause stress and it will affect your work-life balance. Consider asking for help as a part of a solution. Taking or giving advice and contacting your work friends or managers also build mutual relationships.
8. Don’t Neglect Your Personal Time
Sometimes, you may think that work is the only important element in your life – that’s what an employee with a busy schedule can live through.
But spending time on a hobby you love, traveling, and meeting your friends will actually refresh you to do more work and focus. Doing different activities will help you to think creatively and it is necessary for any field that requires problem solving.