Work-life balance has become elusive for many employees, due to a pervasive work culture, constant connectivity, and increasing demands, which have blurred the lines between professional and personal life.
This often leads to negative spillover, which causes increased stress, reduced productivity, and elevated employee turnover rates. In fact, a McKinsey report found that one in four employees experiences burnout, and over 19% blame a poor work-life balance for their increased stress at work.
As an employer, it’s essential to put some people-first measures in place in order to avoid these situations. We’ll share some key ones you can implement right away to improve work-life balance for employees.
1. Offer Flexible Work Arrangements
The traditional work ethic is rigid. Workers must be in their office seats from 9 to 5. Employees who come in a minute past nine are unpunctual, whereas those who don't feel the kick in their offices are considered misfits.
This increases the rate of absenteeism since it doesn’t consider the special circumstances of your employees, such as nursing mothers who have to spend more morning time with their children.
To fix that, you can introduce flexible ethics like the flextime and remote work options. Flextime means allowing your employees to choose when they start and end work in a day, so long as they spend the designated hours or they execute the allocated tasks.
For instance, instead of starting work by 8 am till 4 pm, your employees can start by 10 am till 6 pm, 9 am till 5 pm, or anytime of the day they find okay. This is beneficial for parents, long-distance commuters, and people with varying periods of day productivity.
Adopting a hybrid work culture—remote and on-site—also helps your employees exert greater control over their time or spend more time with family. You can always ask them to log their time of active work through a time tracking app. Of course, you’ll also have to set up specific tools such as Talkspirit, to boost internal communication and prevent the disconnect that can come with remote work.
Talkspirit is an all-in-one cloud-based platform that combines communication, collaboration and governance features—perfectly suited for hybrid and remote teams. With integrated chat, video conferencing, and shared workspaces, it keeps your employees connected and aligned, wherever they are. The result: smoother communication, stronger collaboration, and a more efficient hybrid work culture.
2. Implement a Four-Day Workweek
A decade ago, it wasn’t uncommon for people to work over 60 hours a week. Over time, that shifted to the standard 40-hours workweek. Today, driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s a growing push for a 32-hour workweek. This shift reflects the evolving dynamics of our work environment and changing employee expectations.
Things have become more expensive, commuting daily is eating into savings, and employee’s mental health is going down the drain.
Offering a three-day weekend is a meaningful way to support your team—while still getting everything done between Monday to Thursday. It gives employees more personal time to recharge or explore fulfilling activities like reading, learning a new language, or spending quality time with family.
This can also reduces employee burnout drastically, and even help prevent boreout as well.
But to make this model work without sacrificing productivity, it’s essential to first review how your organization operates.
- Identify and eliminate unnecessary tasks or workflows that consume time
- Automate routine processes to improve efficiency
- Shift the focus from hours worked to outcome delivered
You can also start with a gradual transition, possibly beginning with a trial period, to help identify possible challenges and fine-tune it for long-term success.
Brands like Bolt and Buffer have been among the pioneers in adopting a four-day workweek culture. In 2022, Nicole Miller, Director of People at Buffer, reported a drastic boost in productivity and employee satisfaction following its full implementation.
3. Encourage Reasonable Work Expectations
Work expectations can sometimes put your employees on their toes, especially those aiming for promotions or dealing with job insecurities. The situation gets worse when those expectations are unrealistic, such as asking one employee to cover the workload of two because a colleague is absent. Even if compensated, this practice is not advisable, as it can cause burnout in the long term.
Also, your employees may end up sacrificing their personal time to meet these expectations. This could include working late from home, attending every out-of-work event, and staying constantly available. Over time, this erodes work-life balance and impacts well-being.
To prevent this, it’s important to set clear and realistic expectations. One proven approach is using SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This framework helps define manageable objectives while taking into account each employee’s capacity. Assign tasks based on their difficulty and scope, ensuring they match each person's workload—ideally within their capacity, or just below, but never beyond it.
At Talkspirit, we also use the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology—both internally and with our clients. While SMART goals are ideal for setting clear individual tasks, OKRs help align those efforts with broader team and company objectives. They encourage ambitious yet achievable goal-setting, promote transparency, and foster alignment across all levels of the organization.
4. Provide Sabbatical Opportunities
There are tons of leaves, including sick leaves. There’s also sabbatical leave—where you let your employees take time off to engage in other things after a set number of consistent years working with you. During this period, they won’t need to handle their regular assignments or report for work.
That’s not a newly invented concept. For instance, businesses like Adobe already offer four to six weeks of sabbatical leave, and some extend it to a couple of months.
This gives your employees the time to pursue other interests like launching a business, reskilling or upskilling, joining volunteering communities, and travelling abroad.
The period of your employees’ sabbatical leave should be such that it doesn't cripple your business. You can incentivize the leave so that your employees have enough money to hit the road running for a memorable time off work.
In addition to sabbatical leave, you can also provide extra days off to support better work-life balance. This could include specific types of paid leave like menstrual leave, paw-ternity leave for pet care, parental leave, or even give compensatory time off as an alternative to overtime pay.
5. Establish a Right to Disconnect Policy
It’s not uncommon for issues to arise after working hours. Imagine a customer calling about a system failure just an hour past 6 p.m., when your employees have already closed their desks. Such situations are difficult to resolve without contacting relevant units, even if it means paying them for extra time.
To handle these scenarios effectively, consider implementing crisis management plans that cover off-hours. These plans can include hiring a crisis management team for those hours or contracting your existing employees to fill in the roles.
You should, in addition, empower your employees with a right to disconnect policy. However, this will only be effective if you implement it on your organization’s work tools as well.
Team collaboration and communication platforms like Talkspirit allow your employees to completely turn off notifications outside of work hours with a “Do not disturb” mode. This ensures their personal time is respected and they can focus on their personal needs till the next shift.
6. Encourage Regular Breaks
There’s no doubt you have tons of unresolved tasks to assign, and it’s easy to think occasional breaks will get in the way. However, that’s not necessarily true. Several researches have found that taking mini breaks throughout the day helps to reduce stress, restore energy, and ultimately improve productivity.
On the contrary, working for long stretches can wear down mental energy, leading to stress and fatigue—both of which negatively impact performance. To avoid this, encourage employees to take regular short breaks—every two hours, for instance. Just ten minutes to stretch, take a power nap, grab a coffee, catch up with colleagues can make a real difference.
You can also extend existing breaks like lunch time. Allowing them a proper pause will help keep energy levels up.
7. Support Childcare and Eldercare Needs
Some personal stressors, such as childcare and eldercare, can also disrupt work-life balance, making it difficult for employees to focus at work. This reduces productivity and the speed of execution, causing work to eat into personal time, too. The loop continues.
If you have the capital, you can reduce these burdens by giving child care financial support and eldercare insurance. You can also provide on-site childcare services for parents in order to help them save the cost of getting a Nanny.
An example of a brand doing this is Fast Retailing, the parent company of fashion brands like GU and THEORY. Fast Retailing offers up to $1000 per month for up to 36 months in childcare support to all employees, along with a babysitter subsidy program for onsite workers. Similarly, companies like DHL use Lottie to provide eldercare support and help improve work-life balance for employees.
8. Create Employee Wellness Programs
You can implement wellness programs such as stress management webinars and self-management lectures to build a sturdy mental health, reduce burnout, and improve work-life balance for employees.
Encourage employees to exercise by covering gym fees. Offer in-house fitness classes, organize team building activities, and propose hackathons or offsite sport activities to let the steam off.
Salesforce, a cloud-based software company, offers employees a $100 reimbursement to cover wellness-related expenses such as subscriptions to meditation programs or gym memberships. The company has also built several on-site meditation zones to help employees recharge, and provides gym equipment to encourage physical activity.
These initiatives can enhance productivity and ultimately improve work-life balance for employees.
9. Build a Healthy Work Culture
A toxic culture is one that permits unjustifiable demands like repeated overtime requests, fosters lack of respect for individual employees, encourages unappreciative habits, and disregards work-life balance.
According to a report by Oak, 75% of surveyed employees have experienced a toxic work culture and 87% said it has negatively affected their mental health. This affects productivity at work, spills over into the employees’ personal life, and disrupts their work-life balance.
And that’s why it’s crucial to build a healthy work culture. This starts with introducing a zero tolerance policy for disrespect and discrimination among your employees, encouraging open communication, and promoting psychological safety to enable employees to give honest feedback.
Frequent appreciation of your employees, including recognition for every input, is also essential.
Wrapping Up
Balance does not exist, many say. But we both know it's possible if you play your role as an employer and you encourage your employees to play theirs too.
Start by offering flex time and hybrid work opportunities. Encourage reasonable work expectations, provide sabbatical opportunities, and offer specific paid leaves.
Establish a right to disconnect policy, promote regular work breaks, and offer employee wellness programs to cool off. Moreover, consider implementing a 4-day workweek to give your employees more time off work. Introduce a hybrid work structure, if possible, and keep your teams connected together by implementing communication and collaboration platforms like Talkspirit.
Lastly, focus on building a healthy workplace culture by creating a safe space where employees feel comfortable sharing their concerns. This starts with fostering a strong sense of psychological safety—where everyone feels heard, respected, and free to speak up.
Curious about how to cultivate psychological safety in your organization? Download our exclusive white paper to learn more 👇.
Access the White Paper
In our white paper “How to Improve Psychological Safety at Work,” you’ll discover methods and tools for measuring your team’s level of psychological safety, an example of a participative workshop to involve your employees in the company strategy, as well as one testimonial from a company that has implemented this methodology.
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