5 Ways To Promote a Healthy Work/Life Balance

Your work/life balance is one of the most important aspects of making sure you can be happy. A healthy balance makes all the difference.

Our schedules are busier than ever and most of us are constantly trying to juggle workplace demands and family responsibilities. This never-ending struggle between career and personal life can lead to stress overload and eventual burnout.

So fostering and promoting a healthy work/life balance is important for business owners who value their employees’ wellbeing. Companies who embrace this philosophy are attractive places to work, with increased productivity and efficiency, less absenteeism, and a happier, healthier, stress-free workforce. It’s an all-round win-win. Here are five simple ways you can promote work/life balance in your office.

1. Offer Flextime

We all have personal lives outside of work and countless responsibilities, and not everything fits conveniently within those precious hours before and after work. Flextime allows employees to work around their schedules, allowing time for things like picking up kids from school, attending classes, going to the doctor, or maybe even simply avoiding rush hour traffic.

2. Consider Telecommuting

Telecommuting is the business wave of the future and many predict that the majority of companies will operate with either full or partly remote staff over the next few decades. According to a Stanford study, home-based workers are 13 percent more productive than their office counterparts. You can offer this option to employees for maybe a couple of days a week or even full time, according to your needs. Just skipping a long commute two days a week can tremendously improve work/life balance.

3. Exercise Access

Exercise is the best way to keep healthy, along with a balanced diet, and healthy workers are of course more productive. Many office buildings have a gym on-site so do encourage your employees to use it. If there are no facilities, then you can offer membership discounts at a local gym. You can also create office team sports and have weekly meets, or even hold a tennis tournament. This is a fun way to get employees together and foster team spirit.

4. Company Outings

As kids, we all loved school trips –a fun day of no classes! And we’re not that much different as adults. This is one of the best ways to boost morale and allow your employees to socialize and get to know each other better in a relaxed environment. It can be a dinner or lunch event at a nice restaurant or even a day at the local rope course or a game of paintball.

5. Encourage employee training, education and workshops

With technology changing at such a fast rate and with the increasing impact of social media we could all benefit from updating our technical skills. Learning something new bolsters cognitive functioning -you literally create new brain cells. And what boss wouldn’t love employees with more brainpower! Besides brain benefits, learning can be fun and of course, this guarantees a highly-skilled, up to speed workforce.