As a company owner, you’ll fully understand that your employees are your most important asset. For that reason, it is important that you have set clear ground rules when it comes to your work/life balance policy. Be known to address your company’s current work/life balance policy and taking the initiative to make constant improvements will ultimately lead to a more efficient and productive workforce.
Below we have listed some tips on how you can improve your company work/life balance policy, ensuring you that you are able to retain and attract the best employees for your company.
Tip One: Offer Leave Policies with Flexibility
Many companies have now simplified their leave policies by offering all types of leave. For example sick leave, maternity leave, and vacations – instead of treating each type of leave a separate, they have bundled them together and refer to all these types of leave as paid time off (PTO).
Tip Two: Team Building Activities
To maintain and improve your current working environment, it is a great idea to bring all of your employees together regularly allowing them to communicate and build rapport with one another. This helps to eliminate any instances of isolation in the workplace and will also significantly boost the morale and productivity of your workforce.
Although they may seem a bit outdated, and slightly cliché, teambuilding exercises are an extremely great way for you to improve the chemistry between your employees. Make sure you organise teambuilding exercises regularly and take into account activities what your employees may want to do so that they are getting maximum enjoyment.
Tip Three: Creating A Healthy Working Environment
Take into consideration the health and wellbeing of your employees. In doing so, you will able to look for ways to improve how your team functions within your office. Encourage your workforce to carry out healthy working practices, such as taking regular breaks from computer screens, taking regular stretch breaks, and maintaining a good posture, especially when sitting at a desk all day.
Tip Four: Prompt Supervisors and Managers to Care for Staff Members
Make sure all your supervisors and managers are on the constant lookout for signs and symptoms of work overload or office burnouts. Having a workforce that is suffering from fatigue due to work overload can be a huge problem for your business, as productivity will usually decline over these times.
Make sure all of your managers seek to help people who may be suffering from work-related fatigue issues and help them resolve as soon as possible. This can be done by sharing the workload more effectively, reducing deadlines for some time or simply keeping the lines of communication open.
Tip Five: Flexible Working
Thanks to advancements in technology, such as the Internet, it won’t always be necessary for your staff members to work to the usual 9 to 5 working schedule. Offer your employees some time to work away from the office, working hours that suit them, and see if this helps improve productivity.
There are various types of flexible working that you could allow your employees to consider. Flexitime, compressed hours, part-time working, staggered hours and shifts are amongst the ways you could introduce flexible working into your business. Each of these will have their pros, cons and limitation depending on the type of business you run.
Tip Six: Make Your Company A Family Friendly Place
Creating a working environment that is family friendly can also be a wide view to improve your employees’ work-life balance significantly. If you can, it may be a good idea to offer your employees sponsored childcare. Another option is to offer them the option to have workplace childcare. Especially employees who have young children that may find difficult to work for your company as well as looking after their children.
Offering your employees both paid and unpaid family leave may also be a great way for you to promote a healthy work-life balance, as some of your staff members may want to take extra time out to look after certain family members that may require extra support.
Tip Seven: Encourage Creativity
It is important that all your staff members can be creative, enabling them to come up with solutions to many of your company’s problems. It may be a good idea to set off a specific area of your office where employees can be creative, offering their thoughts and opinions on how your company can be forward.
For example, Google is a strong supporter of creativity in the workplace, creating a “20%” program, where developers are permitted to spend 20% of their work hours on a creative project of their own. This mindset has caught on in many workplaces, resulting in companies getting new ideas and strategies to grow their business.
To read more on topics like this, check out the lifestyle category.
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