A successful organization should be fostering a healthy work-life balance for its employees in order to maintain any kind of consistent growth. Employees who experience burnout and stress will often take additional time off which inevitably affects the company’s bottom line. We've outlined the top 5 ways to help your organization support employees to reap the benefits of work-life balance.
1. Foster a Culture of Trust
A large-scale Gallup study of 2.5 million teams concluded that employees were three times more likely to feel engaged when managers communicated with them regularly. Asking for feedback and integrating that feedback into the organization can make employees feel more comfortable. Fostering a culture of trust in this way can help employees feel more connected and able to voice their concerns about work-life balance. A few tips to foster a culture of trust include:
- Transparency: Including employees in the conversation about what the company is doing can make them feel more connection and trust within the organization.
- Regular Communication: Having conversations with employees regularly helps them avoid feeling like an outsider and makes them feel more comfortable voicing concerns.
- Feedback: Regularly ask for feedback from employees; it will help both the organization and the employee.
2. Encourage Health Within the Organization
Are you paying attention when the employees are going the extra mile? Many employers and managers resist the fact that they are acting as models for their employees, but it’s true. Beyond your own behaviors, you can also encourage healthier behaviors within the organization in a variety of ways:
- Model Healthy Behaviors: If you embody health by keeping an eye on what you eat, working out, and not burning yourself out, then you’re modeling healthy behaviors.
- Provide Physical Fitness Initiatives: Not every company can fund an on-site gym, but there are plenty of other ways such as weight loss challenges and jogging and walking clubs.
- Offer Social Support: NIH Studies consistently show that having a strong social network is an essential part of overall health and wellbeing.
These are just a few of the ways you can encourage health within your organization. There are so many ways to get creative with your implementations!
3. Allow for Flexibility
New research from CareerBuilder shows that companies permitting employees to work from home experienced seven times more applications than purely in-person jobs. Allowing employees to be flexible with their schedules is a great way to help them find the work-life balance that they seek; demonstrating to employees that the organization cares about their personal and professional lives. The benefits of work-life balance can be endless. Some ways to offer flexibility include:
- Telecommuting: Whether it’s one less day of a long commute or the option to stay home with a sick family member, telecommuting offers employees flexibility in their work schedules that benefits their day to day needs.
- Regular Communication: By communicating with employees on a regular basis, you’ll create an environment where employees feel more involved and have a stronger desire to execute tasks in a timely manner.
- Part-Time Option: It’s a bit outdated to think that every employee needs to work full-time. Not only can you offer part-time positions, but you can provide it as an option to those already working in the organization.
Counterintuitively, allowing employees greater flexibility can lead to better results and greater employee retention.
4. Establish and Respect Boundaries
If an employee says they need to be home by 6 to let the dogs out, it’s crucial that leadership respects that boundary. We don't want to encourage employees to work that extra hour or pick up that extra shift if we value their work-life balance. Additionally, consider having boundaries with clients so they don’t think they have access to employees around the clock. Some ways to establish boundaries include:
- Employees: Leadership and management can consistently enforce the time boundaries they create as opposed to being loose with it and encouraging employees to work after hours.
- Clients: Many organizations stretch themselves to be able to please their clients, but it's also important to have an organization that respects employees' time away from work. Not only is this great for the employees’ work-life balance, but it makes them more likely to be satisfied at work and stick around.
By establishing and respecting boundaries, you can show you support a healthy work-life balance and improve employee retention rates.
5. Provide Incentives to Adopt Healthy Habits
It proves difficult to see the benefits of work-life balance if employees aren’t incentivized to create it. Rewarding employees with gift card incentives is an easy option to help encourage them to do it. For example, the Engage2Reward™ Choice Card allows employees to select an eGift card brand of their choice, as well as to redeem for more than one. Some of the advantages of using the Engage2Reward™ Choice Card include:
- Flexibility: Allows employees to choose which brands they want to shop.
- Customization: Add a personalized message, animated greeting card, or a photo specific to the employee.
- Instant digital delivery: Send individual or bulk gift cards to your employees instantly via email or text message using your recipient list.
While it can be a challenge to motivate employees to adopt healthy habits, providing employee gift card incentives like the Engage2Reward™ Choice Card can give them a push.
Conclusion
Providing options and incentives for a healthier work-life balance can lead to better outcomes for everyone involved. It provides employees with the opportunity to eat well, sleep well, and be recharged for work. Ignoring this can lead to high turnover rates and on-site burnout. Provide employee gift cards as an incentive to improve work-life balance, and watch as overall productivity and retention improves.
Our Engage2Reward™ Gift Card Ordering Portal gives you access to over 300 gift card brands as well as the ability to instantly access advanced system reports which increase visibility and transparency in your order data. Some of the many reports that you can get access to are:
- Digital Orders: You can view a summary of all digital orders including the date when your gift card is claimed by your recipient.
- Recipient Report: You can use this report to view a summary of Gift card recipients, the quantity of gift cards claimed, total face value of gift cards and more. This report can be used for payroll tax reporting as well.
- Account Balance: Use the Balance Report to view a summary of all Order Transactions for a certain Date Range. All reports can be downloaded to Excel.
