Picture this: A dedicated employee glued to their laptop at 10 PM, missing their child's bedtime story. Or an employee who arrives late at work and leaves before everyone because of some personal reason? Could this be happening in your organisation, too?
Work-Life Balance is harder to achieve than it may sound. In the fast-paced corporate landscape, achieving a balance in life in and outside the office. In order to make sure that the employee achieves it, organisations try a lot of approaches.
However, in the journey to do so, employers usually end up making some common, unintentional mistakes. In fact, most of them don’t even realise it is a mistake at times.
If you are an employer trying to understand these mistakes, we are here to help you. Today, we will take you through these obvious mistakes. Additionally, we will also introduce you to one of our own clients who made these errors and went through a roller-coaster ride.
3 Work-Life Balance Mistakes Organisations Make
If you are one of the top leaders of an organisation, there is a possibility that you might be making a few very common work-life balance mistakes. Let’s take a look at what they are:
Lack of Flexibility
When employees aren't provided flexibility at the workplace, it can affect their productivity. Employees tend to perform better when they work when they are at their best. Employees who are provided a certain time frame within which they need to work their productivity level automatically decreases.
This doesn’t mean that employees get to work whenever they want. It means that the employer and the employee coordinate and work together in the company’s best interest.
Unclear Work-Life Boundaries
Almost 75% of professionals have trouble separating work from life. Although work is a part of life, that doesn’t mean it shadows all other components. Helping your employees set clear boundaries and letting them communicate them clearly can change the entire picture.
As an organisation, you must make sure that your employees are not overpressured and aren’t always sitting in front of their laptops.
Big Communication Gap
Another common mistake that organisations make in helping employees maintain a healthy work-life balance is restricted communication.
When employees hesitate to talk about their priorities and workplace issues, it shows its impact on their work.
As the senior leadership of the organisation, it is your responsibility to ensure that you create a clear and honest communication pathway for your employees.
This way, you will be able to understand what it is that is affecting the work life balance of your team members.
Saturn Enterprises - From Big Investments To Attrition
Satun Enterprises, a conglomerate business, has a very strong industrial background and has been growing tremendously over the last few decades. Their employees have been excelling at their fieldwork.
The company has been trying to expand its horizon, and it saw digitalisation as an opportunity. In order to step into the future, the leadership decided to step in growing the digital businesses further. These are the businesses they thought had great potential.
As a result, the executives decided to go and poach a lot of people from the industry. Because the goal was very big, so was the investment. They had to hire executives at a high pay raise and had to buy the latest, expensive technology.
Investment Led to Over Pressuring
Because a lot of money was invested, the senior leadership of Saturn Enterprises grew impatient about the returns. As a result, they started pressuring the CEO to start delivering returns immediately.
As a result, the CEO started pushing the junior employees of his team. Late nights became very common in Saturn Enterprises. Additionally, in order to get the task done fast, shouting and usage of abusive language increased.
Now, from being a tech company, the organisation took a shift and started becoming a sales-driven company. Given the extreme nature of sales, each employee started feeling the heat. And this went on for 6 months.
Although a few employees complained about the environment, nobody really understood or even took any measures.
Because of all the hard work, soon, the numbers started picking up. However, the more the number raised, the more impatient the senior executives became.
They wanted the employees to push themselves more.
Beginning of Attrition
As a result, some people complained while some even quit the company, but the senior management didn’t bother about it at all.
This went on for more than 2 years. It was then when suddenly 40% of the organisation quit. In fact, these employees also took with them some of the key clients of the company to its competitors.
What led to this? What went wrong that the organisation’s culture became so toxic? Why did the employees not only decide to leave but also take the clients with them?
Well, all this happened because of the 3 major mistakes that the company made.
The first one was that they didn’t make their employees feel safe and secure in their workplace.
Second was that they wanted employees to make work their entire lives with no flexibility whatsoever.
Lastly, the communication gap became so huge that the employees felt unheard.
How Did Saturn Enterprises Overcome This?
When almost half of the employees left the company, Saturn Enterprises became frantic. They never realised that the consequences of their actions could go bad. Now, all they wanted was solutions to their problems.
This is when they came to know about OriginBluy. They signed us up to help them understand what led to attrition within their organisation and how that can be fixed.
They hired a few of our top coaches for the task. The coaches first wanted to get the lay of the land.
As they got to the root of the problem, our coaches helped the executives understand what went wrong and showed them the way to rectify the 3 mistakes they had made.
Wrapping Up
To err is too human. This is how people operate. However, recognising those mistakes and making sure that you rectify them is important.
In an organisation, these work-life balance mistakes can affect your employees' well-being, productivity, and even their willingness to work.
When Saturn Enterprises couldn’t identify their mistakes, it cost them 40% of their employees and top clients.
If you are riding the same boat and want some help, Originbluy is there to serve you. Our programs are set in a way that helps the senior executives understand the loopholes and work on them.
Our experienced coaches target individuals and help them through their journey.
Sign up for our work-life balance program today and get the guidance you need.
Authored by Gouri Maheshwari. To learn more about Originbluy, send us an email at gouri.maheshwari@originbluy.com.
