Work-Life Balance
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 What is Work-Life Balance?
3 What does Work-Life Balance Look Like
4 Ways to Improve Work-Life Balance
5 Benefits of a Healthy Work-Life Balance
Bibliography
1. Introduction
Balancing work and life is a topic for the ages. Many
discussions have happened around this. It is of no surprise that a multitude of
changes are being faced by Professionals in all industries. Some of the common
challenges faced by Professionals are as follows:
·
Expectations being there all the time.
·
All day meetings causing constraints in time.
·
Many distractions caused due to various
communication technologies and open floor plans available in offices.
·
Work assigned outside work hours due to constant
connectedness.
These and many more challenges cause pressure, stress and
burnout which result in health issues. It is possible that Work-Life balance
could be the solution we have all been searching for, but before implementing
any concepts related to Work-Life balance, we need to understand what it means
and how we go about integrating it within the Organization’s processes.
There are some Professionals who believe that maintaining a
Work-Life balance is having the convenience of having the ability to manage
one’s personal life during the workday, without the issues of having to obtain
any permissions or explain to anyone. Another often used definition for
balancing Work and Life is spending equal time or priority for personal and
professional Lives, but both these definitions have their short-comings that
would prevent Work-Life Balance being the intended solution.
2. What is Work-Life Balance?
Normally, you can term Work-Life Balance as the time one
spends on the job activities versus the time one spends on personal activities
such as hobbies, personal interest, and spending time with family and friends.
Once your work starts to demand more of your time and attention, you will start
having less and less time for personal responsibilities and passions.
Most Professionals always strive to achieve a better balance
between their Professional and Personal lives, so as to ensure work does not
consume most of their time. However, the phrase itself can be confusing because
Professional and personal lives do not happen it two completely separate
spheres.
As a response to this issue, a work-life integration or a blending
responsibilities in your Professional and personal lives is being considered as
a very popular concept. When considering this, Professional responsibilities is
considered are one small aspect of your live, which requires consideration
parallel with other important aspects including the home front, family,
immediate community, and personal wellbeing. Rather that having a scale with
two sides competing, the model looks more similar to a Venn Diagram of
interests which overlap.
Figure 1:
Work-Life Integration
Furthermore, whichever phrase you use, in reality, both
phrases describe attempts to manage and maintain our numerous responsibilities.
While this model may provide a more general framework, work-life balance
stresses on much-more sense of division for Professionals who find Professional
responsibilities sneaking into their lives.
3. What does Work-Life Balance Look Like
The exclusive nature of one’s life and our ever-changing
responsibilities ensures that everyone’s work-life balance and work-life
integration look very different to each other. It has been a never-ending
debate regarding how and where we should be spending our time. In trying hard
to achieve a greater work-life balance, you get to decide on your priorities,
where they are relevant to your personal life. Some examples are given below:
·
A working parent, who is staying at home,
tackling work related responsibilities while their newborn child is sleeping.
·
A student prioritizing time spent with friends
over getting an early start on studies for upcoming exams.
·
A lawyer totally unplugging when on vacation.
·
A new joiner prioritizing some extra time to
work on tasks and work responsibilities.
·
A manager maintaining boundaries in
communication and does not respond to emails after 6pm.
·
An employee prioritizing on a schedule to work
only on specific days to ensure that he can look after his elderly parents.
4. Ways to Improve Work-Life Balance
There are many ways to improve your work-life balance. Refer
below for some ways to improve your work-life balance. You start by
experimenting one at a time or trying out a couple of them at a time. The
search to discover a way that will work for might be a long process and will
take some time.
Figure 2: Work-Life Balance
4.1
Pause and Evaluate
Taking some time to comprehend how different aspects of one’s
life impacts with other aspects is a required step when formulating a new
work-life integration that satisfies the requirement. Take some time, pause and
contemplate the current position. The following are some of the questions you
might ponder upon:
·
Have I spent quality time on what I really want
to do?
·
Have I allocated considerable time and energy
with the people or activities that mean a lot to me?
·
Am I still in line with imposed professional and
personal goal?
·
Where are there blockers and why are they
blocker?
While evaluating these questions, maintaining a journal for
your thoughts and feeling a very good method for you to identify aspects where
changes are required. Lastly, answering these questions should provide you with
a better understanding on your current position.
4.2
Assess Your Priorities
After obtaining a better understanding of what needs to be adjusted,
you can start identifying your priorities. The following are some questions
that will help you identify priorities:
·
What are the thing that really matter to me and
have I assigned quality time for it?
·
What aspects can handle compromises and where
are there too many compromises?
·
What contingencies can I take to ensure that I
have allocated time and energy in order to achieve my goal and relationships?
·
Are there aspects in which I can combine responsibilities
to achieve more than one at a time?
4.3
Time Management
After determining which responsibilities to prioritize, it
is very important that you identify how you can effectively manage your time.
Review the current process of how time is spent and identify
ways to improve the schedule wherever possible. You can block your time into
separate time slots in order to focus on one aspect at a time, or utilize a
matrix in order to identify priorities when new, unexpected tasks crop up.
4.4
Establishing Boundaries
Establishment of boundaries is an important factor for time
management. Also, the communication of the set boundaries is as important. If
you are now unable to respond to emails in a prompt fashion after hours as you
are spending time with your family, you will have to let your team know.
There are a couple of types of boundaries such as physical,
emotional or time. You can initiate by setting smaller boundaries and work on
expanding them.
4.5
Reflect, Refine, Repeat
Irrespective of the actions you decide to go forward with in
order to maintain a good work-life balance, you must consider that you are
likely required to adjust and refine the process over time. Major changes in
life can take time, so reflecting on your process and improving it or a regular
basis will be a very important part.
5. Benefits of a Healthy Work-Life Balance
There are many benefits of maintaining a healthy work-life
balance, for both the employee and the employer.
5.1
Benefits for the Employer
If the employer can provide an environment for helping the
employee maintain a healthy work-life balance, there are numerous benefits to
the Organization such as:
·
Improvement in retention of staff.
·
Increase in employee productivity.
·
Improvement in employee engagement.
·
Increase in profitability of the Organization.
·
Improvement in the brand reputation and increase
applicants.
·
Better employee morale.
·
Reduction in employee absences.
5.2
Benefits for Employees
Maintaining a healthy work-life balance will, of course,
benefit in many different ways such as:
·
Improved time management.
·
Personal Growth.
·
Improved Focus.
·
Better engagement.
·
Improved health and wellbeing.
·
Feel better valued.
·
Stress reduction.
Figure 3: Benefits to Employees
Bibliography
Chakravarty, D., 2018. 10 tips for better
work-life balance. [Online]
Available at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/earn/10-tips-for-better-work-life-balance/articleshow/63242949.cms
[Accessed 24 March 2023].
Coursera,
2023. Work-Life Balance: What It Is and 5 Ways to Improve It. [Online]
Available at: https://www.coursera.org/articles/work-life-balance
[Accessed 22 March 2023].
FMPGlobal,
2021. 7 Benefits of a Work Life Balance for Employers & Employees. [Online]
Available at: https://fmpglobal.com/blog/business-benefits-good-work-life-balance/
[Accessed 14 March 2023].
Kryzhanovska,
A., 2022. Finding and Implementing Work-Life Balance Strategies. [Online]
Available at: https://www.getmailbird.com/work-life-balance-strategies/
[Accessed 24 March 2023].
Thomas, M.,
2022. What Does Work-Life Balance Even Mean?. [Online]
Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurathomas/2022/07/26/what-does-work-life-balance-even-mean/?sh=54df3c492617
[Accessed 22 March 2023].
Your article provides a clear and concise overview of the concept of work-life balance, the challenges faced by professionals, and ways to improve work-life balance. It's great that you included specific examples to illustrate what work-life balance might look like for different individuals.
ReplyDeleteYour article is very important to every organisation. According to the Dr.K. Siva Nageswara Rao, Ms. Shaik Maseeha (June 2019), They said that “ Love and humanity are also important to be happy along with the work. Companies are implementing new programs and strategies on how to balance both work and life. Those are productivity growths, Employee energy, Employee motivation and interest for work totally increases profits. Now-a-days most of the organizations are hiring women because they can manage and balance work-life very nicely.” Therefor your article matching with the journal writer idea.
ReplyDeleteValuable and timely topic. With a satisfactory of work-life balance, employers can gain a range of benefits. Productivity is higher, absenteeism is lower, and physical and mental health improves with a higher commitment and motivation to work. So it is the utmost important duty and responsibility of employers to look after their employees by creating a good working culture that leads to a balanced life style. what do you think about that
ReplyDeletethe author has Discussed that work-life balance is highly important, because each and every people have a somewhat busy lifestyle rather than past, here time factor became the most critical dimension for everything. when we examined the modern family concept, we can observe both husband and wife have engaged in jobs for their family's well-being,
ReplyDeletehowever, on the other hand, most the peoples are aware of allocating time for their family's well-being,
Here I need to highlight something, as per the Hofstede cultural dimension model, we can divide the culture into masculinity and femininity culture. Masculinity culture focused on more work and achievements, and femininity describes the focus of society on quality of life, whereas most Europe and Western countries focused on femininity culture rather, however Asian and related countries we can observe Masculinity culture, which means "living for work" rather than "working for life". hence work-life balance is highly important in people's busy lifestyles because most organizations have applied different strategies for balancing the work-life balance to retain talented work staff within the business.
Much relevant article to the modern era and good work. Based on your research on this, how challenging it is to ensure balancing work and life for people like military workers, pilots, medical professionals and remote customer care services?
ReplyDeleteA meaningful article which discusses about Work-Life Balance. In addition to what you have mentioned in your article, there are many ways to achieve a healthy work-life balance. Some strategies include setting boundaries between work and personal time, practicing time management, prioritizing self-care activities like exercise and meditation, and communicating openly with supervisors and colleagues about workload and scheduling concerns. It's important to remember that achieving work-life balance is an ongoing process and may require adjustments over time.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to being crucial for relationships and health, preserving a healthy work-life balance may boost employee performance and increase productivity. Simply said, if your employees don't see work as a chore, they'll put in more effort, make fewer errors, and be more willing to promote your business.
ReplyDelete