What You Need to Know About the New Work-life Balance
Although work-life balance has been a popular buzzword for the past few years and has shown its benefits for employees’ mental and physical health, a new trend is now emerging and slowly stealing its place at the top of employees’ expectations list and HR managers’ challenges.
Work-life fit shifts from the traditional approach to professional life and personal life balance in order to focus on more individualized strategies. The goal is to adapt to diverse profiles that have unique needs, depending on their backgrounds, responsibilities and preferences.
Here is everything you need to know about work-life fit, its benefits, and strategies for implementing work-life fit policies in your company.
Work-life Balance vs. Work-life Fit Benefits
What concretely differentiates work-life fit from work-life balance? Here are the main benefits of work-life policies when compared to more traditional approaches:
- General policies vs. individualization: work-life balance often offers one-size-fits-all solutions, whereas work-life fit strives to adapt to each individual’s priorities, responsibilities and circumstances.
- Flexible vs. dynamic practices: although work-life balance often provides flexibility through remote work possibilities, 4-day workweeks and flexible working hours, work-life fit accommodates an employee’s evolving needs, meaning that it adjusts strategies when changes occur in a worker’s personal life.
- Motivation vs. well-being: while work-life balance policies are great ways to motivate your teams, work-life fit mainly focuses on employee well-being and mental health.
Potential Disadvantages of Work-life Fit
Although it can deliver fantastic results, work-life fit presents potential disadvantages you need to know:
Potential drops in productivity and availability
Some employees can experience low levels of motivation and concentration when working from home or on flexible schedules. They can face distractions and issues of self-discipline.
Moreover, some tasks require several consecutive hours of concentration that might be difficult to achieve outside of traditional work schedules.
Increased management costs
Like any other wellness program, work-life fit policies can be demanding in terms of time and resources.
Apart from the hours spent on building and communicating the new policies, you might need to invest in technology and training to ensure that this change is well-implemented throughout the organization.
Remember that organizational changes often come with increased management costs that you need to consider before taking the plunge.
Risks of inequality
Feelings of unfairness and inequality may arise if some workers feel like they receive less benefits or flexibility than others.
Some jobs cannot benefit from extensive work-life fit policies, and employees who feel less appreciated due to the nature of their work might be disappointed and disengaged.
Negative impact on team cohesion
Although it has great perks, remote work does not offer the benefits of face-to-face interactions (informal communication, spontaneous team-building activities and discussions that drive innovation and progress). In the long run, work-life fit policies can negatively impact team collaboration and cohesion.
Challenges in terms of management and technology use
Work-life fit policies often imply managing employees in different locations or time zones. This can get tricky for managers, especially when it comes to team coordination or performance evaluation.
Technology can be used to face management challenges, but if you don’t use the right tools and methods, your teams might be desynchronized, and your managers might be discouraged. Remember that you need to improve your company’s cybersecurity measures to implement hybrid or remote work models.
Difficulties in disconnecting from work
Work-life fit can blur the line between personal and professional life, which leads to issues of disconnection from work.
Some employees might not appreciate the idea of working from home or outside of traditional work hours. Moreover, the increased use of technology may lead to privacy issues and difficulties in disconnecting from said tools outside of working hours.
5 Strategies to Implement Work-life Fit Processes In Your Company
1. Offer flexibility in all its forms
Flexibility is the basis of work-life fit. You can offer your employees flexible working hours, remote and hybrid work possibilities, compressed workweeks or 4-day workweeks. You can also alternate with these work systems depending on your teams’ needs at a given time.
All in all, flexibility helps employees fit their personal emergencies and realities into their professional lives. No matter the industry and organization you work in, you can find ways to promote flexible work arrangements that will support work-life fit and increase productivity and engagement.
2. Introduce personalized work systems and solutions
To ensure that every schedule is adapted to your employees’ needs and preferences, you can organize a meeting each week to determine and tailor work schedules for each team member. If it works for everyone, you can go for thematic weeks where everyone focuses on coworking and brainstorming sessions, for example. You can even implement job-sharing weeks where your employees can join in a coworker’s task and help them succeed in their current projects!
Of course, these tailored schedules and personalized work systems take time to implement. You might want to invest in solutions that help you automate the process, such as team calendar-sharing solutions or project management tools.
3. Implement specific policies and benefits
Implementing work-life fit programs goes hand in hand with offering new benefits to your teams. For instance, you can offer more paid time off with specific work-life fit requirements in mind, such as elder care support days, personal days, or accrued parental leave.
Make sure that your wellness program directly supports your work-life fit strategy. This means that you have to offer satisfying health insurance and benefits. You can also organize remote or in-office activities promoting mental and physical well-being.
4. Create a supportive company culture
After you have implemented effective policies adapted to your needs and reality, you need to support your employees on a daily basis to ensure your company culture truly supports work-life fit.
The most important aspect of this is to promote open communication and to create a culture of feedback where everyone feels safe and supported when sharing their feelings and experiences. As a leader, you should lead by example with an empathetic and understanding mindset.
5. Evaluate your processes and their results
To ensure that your policies are effective, you need to continuously evaluate your results. Performance management software solutions and project management tools can help you track productivity and performance. Of course, you also need to monitor satisfaction rates to adjust policies according to your employees’ needs. Collect employee feedback through surveys and one-on-one interviews and use it to improve your practices.
Although work-life fit policies offer many benefits, they can be challenging to implement depending on your industry and company culture. If you choose to set up work-life fit practices in your organization, remember that smooth transitions and step-by-step action plans are always more effective and better accepted by employees. Try to collect their feedback to ensure your work-life fit policy supports productivity and satisfaction levels. Remember that your work-life program should first and foremost support and improve your workers’ well-being and overall health.
