We Don’t Consider Work-Life Balance Enough in Our Businesses Anymore
If there’s one thing we can all relate to, it’s the story of that one job that just sucked. They had you work 60 hours a week and expected you to be grateful for the privilege. When you worked there for a year, they gave you a $10 gift card to thank you for all your hard work (and it was for a place you never go anyway!). These kinds of jobs suck for a reason: they do not let you have good work-life balance.
As this kind of attitude towards work becomes more common, we’re seeing all these trends come up. Quiet quitting, for example, where the worker “only does the minimum requirements for their job and never goes above and beyond. You’ve probably read tons of think-pieces on this, but really, all they’re doing is exactly the job they’re being paid to do. From another perspective, these articles are employers complaining about how nobody is willing to work themselves to death for minimum wage.
Poor Work-Life Balance Costs Businesses Billions
According to the Entrepreneur, dissatisfied workers cost companies over $500 billion worth of income due to poor productivity. The reason for this is quite simple: people aren’t machines. Machines will keep doing all the work they’ve been built for as long as you keep the power on, but people are social animals and require social interaction. Even simple perceived social isolation can contribute to mental health issues like Alzheimer’s disease and physical health problems such as premature aging.
This may come as something of a shock, but when people don’t feel good, they don’t want to work hard. You can’t push someone who’s burned out and expect them to do as good a job as when they’re healthy. With poor work-life balance depriving them of social interaction with family and friends, their health – mental and physical – breaks down. The end result is their productivity plummets, leaving you to pay for less work while they still spend the same amount of hours on the job.
Sound bad? It is.
Don’t let poor work-life balance leave you working all hours for no benefit
This Can Affect Business Owners, Too!
If you think that you’re immune to this as the owner of your business, think again. Some employers might rationalize this work attitude by saying “I don’t ask anything from others I don’t do myself,” never stopping to consider that maybe they’re asking too much of themselves, as well. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of working all the time. Your business is very important to you. We get it, but that’s not the healthiest attitude to follow.
If you find yourself spending all your time at the office trying to maximize your business’s efficiency, maybe you should take a step back and really look at how much you’re getting done. You may find that overworking yourself is having the opposite affect. There’s only so much time the human brain is prepared to spend on a single task before it begins wandering and if you try to push that limit, productivity drops. You end up spending more time in the office and getting less done. It’s a bad time for everyone.
What Can You Do?
The best thing you can do for your business is to have reasonable expectations for yourself and your employees. You want to build a business culture that encourages social interaction among the team, rewards good work, makes people feel appreciated, and gives people time to tend to their own needs – physical, mental and social.
For 20 good tips, we recommend giving this blog a read. These tips will help you develop good work policies that will keep yourself and the people you work for happy, healthy, and productive. You’ll end up with people spending less time in the office, but they’ll get more work done during that time, saving you a lot of money paying them for extra hours and still don’t get as much done as they would if their work-life balance was properly managed.
How Can Dragon Financial Help?
The 20 tips we shared are all about business policy. They’re useful, but that’s not really up to us. That’s something you, as a business owner, need to consider. That said, we can help you in other ways. As we say every year at this time, tax season is right around the corner. It’s only a couple months away.
It’s a good idea to get your taxes done as early as possible. This takes a load of your mind, reducing your stress during a highly stressful time. We can help even more by doing it for you. Here at Dragon Financial, helping manage your bookkeeping is our specialty. Why stress yourself doing it yourself, taking time away from the work your good?
If you haven’t got your taxes done yet and need your bookkeeping straightened out for it, we’re here to help. Just get in touch and see how we can save you time, money, and your sanity!