We are all thriving every day at work and also giving time to our personal lives. And, because both aspects of our lives are crucial, one must be prioritized over the other. While we all try to balance work and professional life in neutral gear, sometimes it doesn’t stay that way. Hence, in this article, we tried to outline the different methods and ways that will enable one to have a perfectly balanced life and maintain a work-life balance, specifically listed just for you!
What is “Work-life Balance” in General?
The relationship between work and personal life is known as the work-life connection. Many aspects of one’s personal life, such as family, leisure, and health, can collide with a career. Work-life balance is a two-way street; for example, work can interfere with personal life, and personal life can interfere with work.
Hence, it is essential to strike a perfect balance between one’s career and personal life activities, as both may not always be parallel and often collide with each other, which may not be in a healthy manner.
Stress from work can often have a negative impact on one’s personal life. This may involve coming home after a very busy day and being unable to give time to family, friends, or even ourselves. Self-leisure time, along with family and friend time, is something that everyone requires to live a healthy life, and when work and personal life collide, we often sidetrack our personal lives and give in way too much in our professional lives, leading to an unhealthy lifestyle that often damages one’s mental and physical health over time.
Similarly, sometimes our emotions may intervene in our professional lives and may overtake professionalism in the work environment, often leading to being rude to colleagues or simply having a languishing feeling. Such incidents often create a negative reputation toward one image at work, which necessarily doesn’t have a significant impact, but may have its own downsides depending on the degree of rudeness and whatnot.
Thus, to solve such an issue, it is highly suggested that you focus on certain activities that will help you keep a neutral gear in your work and personal life.
Types of ‘Work-Life balance’ Activities Teams
If you are leading a team and are having a hard time managing a team well due to a lack of a certain work-life balance, then this section of the article is just for you. In this particular section, we tried to jot down various methods that can aid in achieving a perfect, or at least close to perfect, work-life balance for your team.
Taking Time Off Between Work
One of the most problematic situations is working continuously for hours without a proper break in between. According to medical science, our brains can remember things in short bursts, so working for five to six hours may not result in creative and productive output from your team at the end of the day but may lead to possible inefficiency and lack of quality content from your team.
Hence, when having teamwork, ensure you and your team are taking regular and proper breaks and time off between the busy schedule and workload assigned to the team.
Proper Planning
When working with a team, one must focus on creating a proper work and leisure plan. It may include time limits on when to stop working or take short breaks or start working. The plan should have a creative foundation that gives an equal amount of time between personal life activities and work-life to strike the right balance.
Encourage a no-work-at-home Policy after Hours
Furthermore, it is essential to keep a no-work-at-home policy. This means not starting any work after returning home or coming from work after doing hours of work in the office. Hence, keeping a no-work policy at home will give you and your members more time to spend time with family and friends instead of working another four to five hours, which will eventually lead to a very hectic life in the long run.
Work Schedule Flexibility
Work schedule flexibility should be highly focused on when understanding the productivity and other variables of your team. This includes having a good time interval between projects given to the team and not having back-to-back projects and workload being put on your team. Hence, monitoring the time frame of how much work your team is doing and how high the pressure is may help create a work-life balance.
Hobbies Should be Encouraged
Aside from your professional life and its workload, you can have different hobbies that act as therapeutic ways to balance work and life. This may include watching movies, listening to songs, painting, taking a walk every morning, having a garden, or even cooking! Anything that helps keep your creative boat afloat is a hobby. It is also essential that your team members are encouraged to have hobbies as well for a perfect balance!
To conclude
At the end of the day, it highly depends on how your team interacts and communicates and whether work-life balance is a significant issue or not. Hence, the outline mentioned above may not fully align with your team members or either your life motto, but these are outlined for your convenience and pointed out in a way that can help maximize the neutrality between your work life and personal life in the long run.