Getting the balance right: Finding the happy medium between work-life and home-life
Supporting a healthy work-life balance is essential for the sustainability of an employee’s work and ensuring they are happy and content in the workplace. From personal experience, when I was working in London, down in the tunnels seven days a week, I hardly ever got home at all. At the beginning it was fantastic but then over time it starts to wear you down. Work-life balance is the key to be able to sustain the work you are doing and be happy doing it.
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Getting that balance correct can be a difficult task though and even more challenging for employers to support. Work-life balance is different for different people; what each individual employee’s needs to achieve that balance is quite a personal thing. Each individual needs to understand what it means for them and be supported to achieve that. Woods’ culture and leadership support our people to achieve a healthy work-life balance several ways.
Keeping communication lines open with an open-door policy
The foundation of our approach towards creating a culture that supports work-life balance for our employees is our open-door policy. If anyone has any concerns about their workload, or feel they are getting out of balance, then they can come and see the management team. This can be at any level, from a direct superior right up to the directors. Keeping the communication lines open between our employees and their leaders allows us to ensure a work-life balance is being achieved at an individual level rather than an overall company-wide policy implementation.
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Implementing flexible working hours
All our employees have different responsibilities and commitments outside of work. We’ve implemented flexible work hours to help our people balance the needs of their work-life with the needs of their home-life.
Keeping a close eye on workloads and hours worked to reduce long hours
We keep a close eye on our employees’ workloads. If anyone on the team is staying late every day, we will check-in to see if everything is okay. It’s not sustainable to be working 7 days a week or long hours over an extended period of time, and we don’t want our people to have to do that. We are family people too - we want our employees to be able to have time for their families and the things that are important to them outside of work.
Getting the initial resourcing right for projects
When we take on a project, we resource the workload and analyse that thoroughly, looking at how the work is spread across the team. It’s important as leaders at Woods that we don’t overcommit any one team or employee. There is pressure on us to get the initial project resourcing right. Most of the time we get it right, but sometimes we do get it wrong. If that happens, then we make sure we quickly correct it. We don’t want our people to feel obliged to stay late on a Friday night to finish work. That is not part of our culture.
Here are two tips to help you achieve work-life balance for yourself:
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Listen to others if they raise any concerns
From personal experience, you don’t always know that you are out of balance or getting out of balance between work and home. Listen to what your family and co-workers are saying. Quite often you won’t be aware that things are out of balance until it’s too late. The people close to you will often spot the signs first.
Don’t be afraid to tell your manager if you are getting off-balance
Catching that you are getting out of balance or have become off-balance between work and home early is important. When your stress levels start rising, you might think you are excelling at work, but it might be at the expense of your home life. Don’t excel at work at the expense of excelling at home; ask for help from your manager or leaders when it’s needed.