Work-life balance is the practice of maintaining good employee well-being by creating a harmonious balance between an employee’s personal and professional life. In simple terms, giving importance to both private life and life at work leads to an overall healthy lifestyle.
When work-life balance is poor, the most common reason is stress, wherein the employee can neither concentrate on work nor on personal life. This generally happens when the employee works more than his power in a shorter amount of time. But there are steps an employer can implement to curb mental health issues.
In the after-covid era, when companies are adapting to work from home, homes are becoming offices, and there is no other separate location for the workplace. This is why the line between personal and professional life is very blur for defining modern work-life balance.
For instance, one of the employees of a team goes on an unsaid holiday. But his work was highly essential to get done, so it was assigned to another employee, which led to an unsatisfactory increase in the workload. Due to a tight timeline, he has to work overtime and complete the tasks. As a result, he was unable to focus on his personal and family life, causing increased stress and work-life imbalance.
A proper work-life balance helps employees to live stable, healthy, and purposeful lives both at work and personally. This improves employee engagement, work motivation, and critical thinking capability.
Moreover, as the modern workplace evolves, employers need to maintain the proper balance for their remote workforce in terms of work. This allows them to improve employees’ work
from home productivity and reduce mental stress. Apart from this, as today’s workforce gives importance to jobs that focus on employee well-being, establishing proper balance will also enhance the company’s talent acquisition, efficiency, and employee retention.
Work-life balance can be disturbed for a lot of reasons that are sometimes in the control of the employee and sometimes not. Following are the reasons causing an imbalance in personal and professional life.
If employees have a consistent poor work-life balance, there can be many consequences. Impacts on personal and social life are:
Impacts on the organization are:
Mentioned below are the workplace practices that employers can implement to foster a culture of proper work-life balance.
Balance in work and personal life is giving importance to everything that enriches, satisfies, and develops a human being. It includes work, career, family, relations, health, hobbies, interests, refreshment, social activities, spirituality, and learning. Following are the strategies an employee can utilize to reach that level.
