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.
Employee Benefits Plans: Getting The Focus Back To The Workplace
Source: https://insuranceontheweb.ca
According to a study by ComPsych Corporation, personal relationships at home are the top distractions for employees while at work. Business owners reading the study may not be aware that many of these issues have support within their employee benefits plans.
The responses for top distractions were:
22% – Relationships at home
16% – Relationships in the work place
15% – Financial / Legal problems
11% – Child or caregiving issues
6% – Personal health concerns
4% – Communication (cell phones, instant messaging, social media)
7% – Other
A Healthy Work/Life Balance
How can an employer help get an employee’s focus back to the workplace, increase productivity, and create a more stable working environment?
There are resources within employee benefits plans such as implementing an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) that provide allow employers to provide a 24/7 confidential resource for their workforce. EAP provides information, tools, and counseling services that help your employees get through the situations that create stress in their lives from a qualified professional with the comfort of confidentiality.
Over the years it has been proven employees use these services when available in their employee benefits plans. When employees have a professional to consult with during a crisis it takes the stress of life out of the workplace. This in turn improves productivity & creates a more stable, reliable employee.
A healthy employee is more present and focused at the task at hand. There are thousands of distractions that take an employee’s focus away from their work but the important ones to manage aren’t blocking Solitare or Facebook, it’s ensuring the health of your workers. Benefits that cover spouses and children also offer employees the peace of mind a working parent needs when bills not covered by Canadian health care come up.
Creating the Adaptable Workforce
By Alan See
Source: Networking Exchange Blog
Cross-Training, Job Rotation, and Skills Development Prepare Employees for Business Change
“I’ve been in this business for 30 years and I’ve never seen it like this.”
I can recall hearing that statement three times over the course of my adult working life. The first time I heard it was very early in my career. My boss at the time had been a part of the Texas oil field service industry for over 30 years and the mid-80’s oil crash was taking its toll. What once had boomed was now busting. Stripper wells that had been profitable were being plugged, and new drilling activity came to a virtual standstill. Prospects in the oil business were looking pretty dim.
I also remember the second occasion as if it were yesterday. It was the early 90s and I was at lunch with a co-worker who had just received their 30-year service pin from a major computer company. The World Wide Web was just beginning to make the world a much smaller place, and Louis Gerstner stepped in to save IBM from going out of business.
A couple of years ago I heard the statement again. Let’s just say that social media, digital marketing, and mobile applications are proving to be major change agents for marketers in general. Tracking that statement for three decades, it’s obvious that change is timeless and cuts across all sectors of the economy.
How are you dealing with constant change? From my perspective I can vouch for the following:
- Don’t try to ignore the situation creating the change because that will only keep you off balance.
- Getting angry doesn’t help and often makes it worse.
- The “good old days” never really happened, and wishful thinking is a waste of time.
More importantly, top management can’t hand out “grand plan” detailed answers to address the entire transition because all the information they need simply doesn’t exist. Their new strategy in its full detail will need to evolve during the change process. In short, top management doesn’t have all the answers because some of the questions keep shifting. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need your support. In fact, broad-based, grassroots support of change can make the difference for every organization.
During a time of constant change (which is all the time!) here are five things you can do to prepare yourself and support your company:
- Volunteer for assignments that push you out of the framework of your current job responsibilities. Some projects can give you medium-term exposure to new people and new kinds of tasks, preparing you for a broader range of future responsibilities. Assignments that provide extended exposure may include such things as cross-training, job rotation, and stretch assignments.
- Take advantage of available learning and development resources. At many companies, training is available but under-utilized. Most of us feel too rushed in our current work to fit in the occasional hour or two of training. Become the exception to the rule — the employee who learns, grows, and actively prepares for new pursuits. It’s good for your image as well as your broadening skill set.
- Make it a personal goal to learn more from your boss and your colleagues. Close work relationships put you in daily contact with the parts of other people’s work you may not fully grasp at present. Management practices in today’s business world call for flexible workers who can step in to perform available tasks rather than filling a single defined role.
- Put some thought into the learning and development activities you would most like to pursue. Have an informal conversation with your boss about them. Then weave together your ideas and your boss’s ideas and bring them with you to your next performance review. After the usual evaluation of your work, turn the conversation to future growth of your skills to make you that much better of an employee.
- Explore career opportunities that take you to different functional units within your company. Moving employees from role to role across leadership and functional areas is common in organizations that adapt quickly to changing environments. By pursuing those opportunities, you make yourself more valuable to the company while expanding your professional horizons.
The above are practical steps for embracing change and putting you on the leading edge of your constantly evolving work life. They can give your business a leg up in dynamic times and help you become the employee who pushes ahead, rather than the one who hears about change only as it happens.
WORK/LIFE SURGE
Technology has spawned an increase in work/life balance among U.S. workers over the past three decades, according to a Workplace Options study. Forty-three percent of respondents said they've seen an increase in work/life benefits and access to professional development in their current job compared with their first-time job. Also, 28 percent said their current company has increased work/life benefits in the past five years despite the rough economy.