Work-life balance study offers model for success
Originally posted May 16, 2014 by Dan Cook on www.benefitspro.com.
Work-life balance is out of balance in the United States, and it extracts a toll both on the job and at home. An oft-referenced 2010 survey starkly revealed how out of whack work-life balance is. Since, there’s been no evidence that it’s improved, despite the amount of discussion the subject generates.
But a recent controlled study that examined the effect of giving employees more say in their work schedule indicates that such an approach to addressing the issue could provide quantitative and qualitative benefits to employers.
The study involved 700 employees of a Fortune 500 IT corporation. Designed and conducted by two University of Minnesota researchers, the study offered half the participants considerable control over their work schedules. The other half put shoulder to the wheel in the “normal” fashion, the researchers said — meaning they let the boss set their schedule and simply followed through.
The upshot, according to the study: “Workplaces can change to increase flexibility, provide more support from supervisors, and reduce work-family conflict.”
The study revealed “significant improvements” in how the schedule-controllers reported feeling about life on the job and at home during the six-month study period.
“Not only did they have a decrease in work-family conflict, but they also experienced an improvement in perceived time adequacy (a feeling that they had enough time to be with their families) and in their sense of schedule control,” the study said.
Those who benefited the most from the additional schedule control were working parents and employees who said their bosses didn’t support work-life balance prior to the study. On average, the schedule controllers worked about an hour less a week than their counterparts, and they continued to be as productive as they had been prior to the study.
“There was no evidence that this intervention increased work hours or perceived job demands,” the researchers said.
In a news release, the researchers, Dr. Phyllis Moen and Dr. Erin Kelly, claimed that their work offered corporations a path toward enhancing employees’ lives without risking lost productivity. Too, they said, it would be important to establish a formal work-life balance program as opposed to the types of informal, case-by-case work-life balance experiments many companies have dabbled in.
“Work-family conflict can wreak havoc with employees’ family lives and also affect their health,” said Rosalind King, of the Population Dynamics Branch at the National Institutes of Health. “The researchers have shown that by restructuring work practice to focus on results achieved and providing supervisors with an instructional program to improve their sensitivity to employees’ after-work demands, they can reduce that stress and improve employees’ family time.”
3 goals for work-life balance
Originally posted April 29, 2014 by Brian Tracy on https://www.lifehealthpro.com
Just as a wheel must be perfectly balanced to rotate smoothly, your life must be in balance for you to feel happy and effective. To achieve a good work-life balance, you must tend to these three types of goals:
1. Goal setting for your business and career (What do you really want?) The first category of goal includes business, career and financial goals. These are the tangible, measurable things that you want to achieve as the result of your efforts at work. These are the ‘‘whats’’ that you want to accomplish in life.
When you go about setting goals for your business and career, you must ensure that they’re tangible. You must be absolutely clear about how much you want to earn, and in what time period you want to earn it. You must be clear about how much you want to save, invest and accumulate, and when you want to acquire these assets. Remember, you can’t hit a target that you can’t see.
2. Your purpose in achieving your goals. (Why do you want to achieve your goals?) The second goal category consists of personal, family and health goals. In reality, these are the most important goals of all in determining your happiness and well-being. These are called the ‘‘why’’ goals because they are the reasons you want to achieve your business, career and financial goals. They are your true aim and purpose in life.
Many people become so involved with their careers and financial goals that they lose sight of the reasons why they wanted financial success in the first place. They get their priorities mixed up. As a result, their lives get out of balance. They start to feel stressed and become angry or frustrated. No matter how hard they work to achieve their business and financial goals, they don’t seem to enjoy any more peace, happiness or satisfaction.
What they need is to bring their goals back into the right order and realize that work and financial goals are a means to an end—which is enjoying family and relationships. They are not the ends in themselves.
3. Personal development goals. (How do you achieve your goals?) The third type of goal centers on professional growth and personal development. These are the ‘‘how’’ goals. Goal setting, learning and practicing new skills and behaviors are how you achieve the ‘‘what’’ in order to enjoy the ‘‘why.’’
By working to improve yourself, you can become the kind of person who is capable of achieving your business, career and financial goals. Your personal, family and health goals will come faster and more easily.
By working on these three types of goals simultaneously, you can maintain a healthy work-life balance while continuing to move onward and upward.