Work Life Balance
#WorkLifeBalance is the most abused word right now in the corporate world, something that every organization preaches but is practiced by a very few. If I simply look back at our schedules and how our day goes away I seriously feel there is nothing like work life balance no matter how much we try and search it. A survey states that 76% of female and 56.4% of male working population feels that they are stressed due to work culture.
Let us understand what it brings along for each one of us in the industry and how it is very important for building and sustaining a great work environment.
The corporate culture nowadays forces you to believe that
your work is the most important aspect of your life, and it takes precedence
over everything as you can work hard at the early stages of your career and
then you can live happily for the rest of your life and from this flock of
hardworking employees we see two sets of people
- Those who decide to stay a corporate employee all their life and succeed because of the good work they have put in.
- Those who become and entrepreneur and these folks have a different perspective altogether.
The first one has seen and achieved everything with hard
work (keeping aside the politics) and expects everyone to be as hard working as
he is/was and he will ensure that he keeps reminding everyone about how he used
to work hard and how it has helped him reach where he is right now. The eco
system around him (his Boss/ HR etc.) will be so closely sold around his belief
that automatically anyone not living up to the standards set by him will be
seen as an underperformer.
The second type the Entrepreneur can be more dangerous, they
work on the belief that they have succeeded basis their merit and everyone
around them must follow the same principles in life to be successful and to
make it all worse they are the Eco-System.
Let’s have a look at what these types of people bring to
their immediate employees.
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Both the type of folks bring unwanted stress to
their employees and employees are always under stress to perform.
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Employees are more often seen hesitant in asking
time or saying no to the projects with stringent timelines.
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Employees often sacrifice extra hours just to
meet timelines and are often seen cutting their family time.
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This leads to stress and frustration that at
times shows in their behavior or in long term becomes a part of their nature and seen as ill temperedness.
Let us see how we as leaders can work around our eco system
to improve.
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Allow employees to be more comfortable in form
of giving feedback.
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Allow a mechanism where we track employee’s
mental health and ensure regular time offs!
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Let’s move away from standard operating
procedures and allow employees to be creative.
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Let’s take a conscious call of not calling for
work related stuff after 6:30pm
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Let’s have ways of passing on the rewards of the
hard work an employee puts to the family.
Some small steps like this may not bring a lot of change but
will surely help improve the overall wellbeing and help improve Work Life
Balance.
