What Makes a Company Excel at Creating Work-Life Balance?

The leader of any successful company will tell you that a work-life balance is good for corporate wellness; a reputation of putting employee wellbeing first increases morale, yields superior work and attracts the best talent in the market. Recently, job site Indeed.com released a list of the top 25 companies nationwide in terms of work-life balance, and director of recruiting Mark Steinerd explained, ‘Proper work-life balance makes employees feel appreciated, which in turn makes them more productive and more likely to stay with the company for an extended period of time… This list showcases those companies that, according to previous or current employees, got it right.’

 

Companies who made the list often infused balance into the work day itself, through creative managerial practices. Desk time is often the epitome of work day drudgery, and so Farhad Chowdhury, the chief executive officer of the application development firm Fifth Tribe, works with collaborators over an intensive four-mile hike rather than a conference room. The physical challenge is a great team-building exercise, and the collaborating element promotes thinking outside the box by removing professionals from the box itself. Chowdhury noted, ‘That’s why I try to do this with everyone with whom I interact professionally.’

 

Flex time also rated high on Indeed.com’s list of companies. As an employee at Wegmans explained, ‘Because I am a college student, my schedule can sometimes be all over the place. Thankfully Wegmans is more than happy to work around my school and personal schedule and make a work schedule that I can easily adhere to. For the two years I have worked at Wegmans, I have not regretted one minute of it!’ Most of us would rather work to live, rather than live to work, which means we place higher value on picking our kids up from school, attending a class or going to an important family event, than putting in the nine to five. During his 2010 TEDTalk Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work, Jason Fried, co-founder of the Web application firm 37signals, explained a flexible professional atmosphere allows the long, uninterrupted thought required for great (and even good) work to manifest.

Categories: Balance, Companies, flexible hours, hiking, life, life balance, list, productivity, work, work day, work life

Out of the Office: The Working from Home Debate

At the recent South by Southwest festival, wellness experts convened to discuss work environments in a talk entitled “Your Desk Job Makes You Fat, Sick and Dead”. This was part of a larger discussion series, aiming to highlight how corporate wellness begins with employee physical, emotional and environmental wellbeing, and this is the incentive that flexible work arrangements, such as working from home, offers.

Moderator Cali Williams Yost, CEO of Work+Life Fit Inc. which is a business that provides consultation and resources for navigating work-life balance, noted that companies such as Yahoo and Best Buy Co are ending location and schedule flexibility for most employees. She said, ‘We could not have planned to have this panel at a better time. Physically and mentally, a lot of us are not doing very well the way we are working currently, and what that does then is it carries into the workplace.’ She continued, ‘We can’t be as creative and innovative and engaged if we aren’t our best physically and emotionally, and that all interacts together to make us and our organisations fat, sick and dead.’

According to Yost, the media tends to cover the extremes of entirely in-office or out-of-office schedules, but a hybrid model, what she refers to as “workshifting,” is a solution that suits many businesses. ‘There needs to be a much more expansive way to think about how, when and where we work, and one way to think about it more expansively is workshifting and really finding the optimal time and place for business and people,’ she said.

Global Workplace Analytics recently showed that 36% of employees would choose increased flexibility over a raise, while a separate study of technology professionals revealed that 37% would even have a 10% pay-cut, if that meant they could work from home. Kate Lister, the president of Global Workplace Analytics, argued, ‘By avoiding the commute just half of the time, a typical employee can gain back 13 days, equivalent work days, that they would have otherwise spent playing in traffic, and they can save between $2,000 and $7,000 per year. Again, this is just half of the time not going to the typical office.’

Leah Brinkmeyer, a Chicago-based marketing executive, attested to the employee-employer benefits of workshifting, ‘The biggest thing is if the company allows for flexibility, then they also have strong values and have high regard for family-work balance. My family is No. 1 in my life, and since they respect that, I find myself bending over backwards for them and being very loyal to them — even if our raises are minimal to none.’

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Out of the Office: The Working from Home Debate

Categories: Benefits, flexible hours, working from home