Promoting Work-Life Balance Tips

Work-life balance is a challenge for everyone. Even though each job is different in terms of its hourly demands, the truth is that a large part of the day is filled with professional life. However, the topic has been increasingly discussed within organisations due to increased concern about workers’ mental health. The lack of this balance can lead to problems such as lack of productivity, demotivation, and even the departure of an employee from the organisation, leading to an unwanted increase in turnover. In a pandemic context, with remote work being an option much more used by most people, the line that separates the professional and personal life is no longer the distance between home and office, having converged to the same physical space. With this, it has become even more important to ensure a psychological balance between work and leisure. Therefore, we have gathered 7 tips to work on this topic in your organisation, in order to promote a more sustainable balance for your employees:

1. Make a Diagnosis

Before working on a subject like mental health, it is necessary to make a diagnosis of your company’s current situation. In this diagnosis, it is important to understand how people deal with the separation between their professional and personal life. Some key questions could be about their daily habits, other activities in their life and wellbeing habits. This diagnosis makes it possible to identify the main problems and implement solutions adapted to the real needs of your employees. Furthermore, different teams are made up of different people, with different working methods, who may have different problems for which adapted solutions are needed. With GFoundry, through Contributions, you can share well-being forms that can be filled in by all employees in your organisation. This way you have access to key information about how your people feel, what problems they experience, and what needs they have in their context.

2. Promote education on the topic

Once the issues have been identified, it is crucial to disseminate information on the topic of work-life balance. Some options are organising webinars on work-life balance or sharing newsletters on wellbeing. The aim is to ensure the sharing of tools that employees can use to identify their needs and subsequently take action so that they can improve their wellbeing. At GFoundry, through the Learn Module, besides being able to integrate all your employees’ training content, you can also insert new categories with wellbeing content to which users can have access whenever they need it.

3. Implement well-being activities

Besides promoting knowledge on the subject, it is also crucial to demonstrate its practical side. Promoting physical and/or psychological wellbeing activities allows your employees to pay more attention to their own wellbeing, having healthier lifestyles. Some examples could be joint physical exercise classes (in person and/or online), healthy cooking classes, yoga sessions, among other possibilities – possibilities that may come from suggestions left by your own employees in the diagnosis phase. On the GFoundry homepage there is a News Feed where you can communicate all the scheduled activities, allowing your employees to always be aware of the wellbeing agenda within your organisation.

4. Use flexible working to your advantage

Giving your employees the possibility to have more flexible working hours is an important tool for the well-being of your employees. There are several possibilities regarding flexible working policies in organisations. Whether it is through flexible starting and ending times, the possibility to choose working hours freely or even not having defined working hours but rather objectives to be accomplished, allows your employees to reconcile their professional life with their personal issues in a simpler way. Employees can fulfil their tasks and still be present at important family moments, do physical activity at a time that is more beneficial to them, or enjoy leisure moments that are necessary for their well-being. With GFoundry’s Goals Module, it is extremely simple to manage your team’s objectives through the OKR – Objective Key Results – methodology. Having all your objectives on your mobile phone, and even having access to their completion status, it is much easier for your employees to manage and achieve their goals.

5. Use remote work to your advantage

Together with the flexibilization of work, the possibility of being in telework allows the employee to better manage his personal life conciliated with his professional life. Whether it is because their children are sick, or because a doctor’s appointment has been scheduled for mid-morning, the possibility of being on remote work allows the employee to meet their personal schedule while still being productive for their organisation, and not disrupting the normal flow of work. In addition, some studies show that employees can increase productivity rates by 13% when working from home. GFoundry, being a multi-platform solution, allows employees to access its contents anywhere – either through their computer or through their mobile phones.

6. Promote discussions on the subject

Even more important than promoting a culture of wellbeing and balance, is to implement a culture of open discussion about the issue. Ensuring that people can discuss the issue openly with their colleagues and superiors allows employees to feel comfortable discussing any need they feel, preventing the issue from escalating. Through GFoundry’s Engagement Thermometer, it is possible to constantly and periodically analyse metrics such as work-life balance, alignment, feedback, satisfaction and well-being, among other essential metrics to understand how your teams feel.

7. Lead by example!

Finally, it is important to demonstrate to employees that this balance can and should be promoted by anyone within the organisation. It is not only important that teams use all the tools at their disposal, but that their leaders can also encourage their peers to promote a culture of wellbeing and balance. At the end of the day, employees feel more motivated and productive, ensuring better results for the organisation as a whole. Would you like to promote a better balance between the professional and personal life of your employees with the help of GFoundry? Learn more about our solution and book a demo with us! Read more: How to promote a good work-life balance for employees post-COVID-19

Do: Invest time in Internal Communication

For internal communication to be structured and effective, it is necessary to invest time in its planning. It is not only important to plan what kind of messages are important to transmit internally, but it is also essential to understand which channels are used, how often this communication is used, and also how feedback can be collected on how the communication is working internally.

This planning should not be done in the short term, but in the medium-long term, and it is also important to define the main objectives of this strategy. Is it to align all employees with the values? With the strategic vision? With the objectives? With the market strategy? Or with all of these?

Do: Listen to your employees and give them a voice 

After the implementation of an internal communication strategy, it becomes crucial to listen to people. Just as it is important for a Marketing department to listen to consumers regarding their advertising, it is important for the person responsible for Internal Communication to understand what their performance is on the messages that are trying to be disseminated internally.

With this feedback, it is possible to adapt the strategy and continuously improve the communication that exists in the company, allowing even more promising results.

Furthermore, giving employees a voice in a more agile and direct way so that they can share their ideas and suggestions allows innovation processes within the organisation to become more frequent and simpler. This possibility allows employees to feel more comfortable sharing their ideas and suggestions for improvement, which can lead to very interesting performance results.

Do: Adapt to changes! 

Today, more than ever, the contexts in which we are inserted change from one day to the next. If prior to a pandemic period internal communication in the company could use physical communication channels (such as face-to-face meetings or events), today the key lies in the digitalisation of communication channels.

Being different from case to case, and from organisation to organisation, it is important that internal communication is adapted to the reality, in order to guarantee that all employees receive the same information, the same content, at the same time. This way, it is possible to avoid misunderstandings and even internal misinformation.

Don’t: Complicate contact between departments

One of the main mistakes made by organisations is to bureaucratise communication between departments / areas / teams. Depending on the organisational structure, it is important that everyone is in contact. Not only does it allow for more efficient contact between different structures in the organisation, it also facilitates the sharing of information and messages between people.

An organisation that bureaucratises communication tends to create more internally isolated groups, leading to more withholding of important information between different groups.

Don’t: Use only email as internal communication channel

The messages transmitted internally may be on various themes and subjects. Therefore, it is important to understand which communication channels are the most efficient for each topic.

Very often, email is used as the main tool for internal communication. However, email is also a work tool, where employees may receive messages related to their functions, causing corporate information to be left aside.

Thus, it is important to understand what other channels you have at your disposal to communicate important messages for the organization, ensuring a general and common access to all, avoiding loss of information.

Don’t: Forget to share progress reports

Since it is important to share the strategic objectives of the company, and align all employees with these same objectives, it also becomes extremely relevant to share what their state of completion is.

In this way, employees will not only be aligned with the goals they have to achieve, but they will also be aligned with their degree of completion, and what efforts they will have to make to achieve them, feeling increasingly responsible for the organisation and its success.

How does GFoundry impact my Internal Communication?

GFoundry is a leading solution for Employee Engagement. More than just being a platform for gamification and employee engagement, it is also a tool for internal communication. 

Not only can it represent a company’s information centre (in the same way that an intranet works), it can also function as the top layer that encompasses all the available platforms in the organization, making the employee experience more interactive and centralized.

Being a cross-platform solution (being available in web version and Android and iOS app), it allows employees to be in touch with their organisation directly through their phones.

In addition, GFoundry has very important tools for an efficient internal communication.

Push Notifications

With employees having access to an application on their smartphones, it is possible to send push notifications, either to all employees or only to a certain group. In this way, it is possible to transmit short messages in an agile and fast way.

Want to inform your employees about a meeting? A new piece of news? Or even wish them a good day at work? You can say anything you like!

News

On the homepage of the platform there is a News section. In this section, you can share any type of information with employees and it can also be filtered for certain groups within the organisation.

In the news, you can include text, images, PDFs, videos, or even links to other platforms, making it an important information centre for your teams. Do you need to communicate new training sessions? New events? New internal processes? New employees? You can communicate it all!

Engagement Thermometer

The Engagement Thermometer is an essential tool to understand the feedback from your employees regarding their connection with the organisation itself. This way, you will be able to have frequent and clear feedback on the level of employee engagement, being directly impacted by the effectiveness of internal communication.

You can learn more about the Engagement Thermometer here.

Surveys

With the Contributions Module, you can listen more directly to your employees, sharing internal questionnaires on how internal communication is working, what suggestions for improvement they may have, and even collect opinions on other types of messages that can be shared.

You can lear more about the Contributions Module here.

Goals

With the Goals Module, it is possible for the employee to have access to their individual objectives, team objectives and also their completion status. 

In addition, and through the OKR (Objective Key Results) methodology, the employee will have greater insight into how their individual roles will impact the overall set of objectives of their team, their department and even their organisation, resulting in greater strategic alignment.

You can learn more about the Goals Module here.

Innovation

With the Innovation Module you can manage innovation processes within your organisation. Whether for a specific area of the organisation or for the structure as a whole, you can allow your employees to share ideas and suggestions for improvement in a simple and agile way.

Furthermore, all employees will be able to access the shared ideas, vote on the ones they like best, and even comment with feedback and new suggestions on the same idea!

This crowdsourcing model (model that uses the knowledge of your community) allows a greater involvement of your employees in the continuous improvement of your organisation’s processes.

You can learn more about the Innovation Module here.

Would you like to know more about how GFoundry can help your Internal Communication? Book a demo with us!

The importance of Climate Surveys

Organisational Climate is defined as the environment in the organisation, resulting from a collective perception regarding employees’ emotions and behaviours. This perception has an impact on the experience and alignment of employees with their organisation.

Some organisations conduct Climate Surveys only once a year. In a period of great uncertainty and upheaval (such as the year 2020), there is greater instability, resulting in a phase of change, considering that employees may change their goals, motivations, or even experience changes on a personal level. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out these studies systematically and periodically, in order to prevent future problems of alignment and connection with the organisational culture. 

Some challenges such as high employee turnover, lack of motivation and lack of productivity in teams can be overcome at an early stage if the causes are correctly identified. It is even more important to be able to identify which factors may be influencing, in a positive or negative way, the organisational climate, in order to use them as decision-making tools.

It is essential to obtain results on Organisational Climate from a general point of view of the whole organisation, but it is also crucial to be able to detail the analysis by teams and/or departments. This detailed analysis allows the early recognition of gaps in the work environment of employees in certain groups, since leadership has a significant impact on climate.

Challenges from the pandemic

If before 2020 the challenges of measuring and managing the organisational climate were complex, in a pandemic period this challenge has become even greater.

The SARS-COV-2 pandemic has accelerated a much-debated trend among Human Resources professionals – the flexibilisation of work. If, on the one hand, it is a benefit for employees to have flexibility as to their choice of workplace, and even their working hours, it is, on the other hand, a challenge for HR professionals to manage people at a distance.

Managing teams remotely brings with it very different challenges in terms of aligning and connecting employees with their teams, with their leaders, and even with the organisation itself. It is therefore crucial to adjust employee information gathering practices in order to be able to take effective measures to improve their connection with the company.

Engagement Thermometer

The Engagement Thermometer allows you to know the main trends, feelings and behaviour patterns throughout the company through continuous feedback from the whole community.

The platform users periodically and automatically answer questions segmented by 9 metrics (such as Feedback, Recognition, Personal Development, Engagement with Managers, among others), giving rise to an engagement score that can be consulted afterwards.

The Thermometer is an important tool not only to analyze the momentary picture of the organization, but also as a way to evaluate the evolution of certain metrics over time. Through this temporal analysis, it is possible to understand the impact of the implementation of certain measures in the organisation, supporting all decisions made by the top management.