If you don’t want to have employees with burnout syndrome, who are unmotivated, or an organization with high turnover rates, you need to pay attention to the balance between work and personal matters. Reliability ensures good performance and the health of assets, and people will always be the most important asset for any organization.
Why is it important for organizations that their employees have a harmonious balance between their work and personal lives? Work-related stress leads to various situations that will affect performance, professional contributions, and the development of a healthy work dynamic, which is necessary for organizational and financial success.
In this series of articles, I address leadership from the perspective of the Uptime® Elements Framework, specifically the People and Culture at Work Domain (recently added to the framework) and the elements that make up that domain. One of these elements is Work-life Harmony (Wlh) and, as its name suggests, it focuses on this aspect, which it conceives as a dynamic cycle aimed at achieving sustainable, high-performance teams that sustain the success of the organization.
In the article “Community and Connection: relationships, inclusion, and collaboration in the service of organizational excellence” (link), we addressed the value of connection and communication in order to have workers and employees who are motivated and committed to the organization. Here, this Wlh Element refers to taking care of the well-being of workers to avoid burnout or high turnover and maintain optimal performance by work teams.
Improving life to improve performance
From the Reliability Leadership approach, work and personal life are not opposing forces that are balanced by tension between the two but rather spheres of growth and well-being that complement each other and between which the worker can move, create, and thrive. It is a symbiotic and harmonious dynamic in which each sphere (personal and professional) nourishes and sustains the other.
That is why this element focuses on the term “harmony” rather than “balance,” because the psychological and emotional implications of the two terms are not the same, even though in common parlance they tend to be treated as synonyms.
Among other advantages, the Uptime® Elements framework allows for a unified language, promoting communication and efficiency, which is why the choice of terms and words is completely intentional. In this case, the choice of the term “Harmony” defines exactly what the relationship between work and personal life should be. It is not a question of opposing forces that cancel each other out and enter into a static equilibrium. Quite the contrary: as explained above, it is a dynamic cycle, because working conditions are not static, nor are personal dynamics.
Workers advance professionally, move up to new jobs, and take on new responsibilities, and this impacts their personal lives in different ways. While the worker’s personal sphere remains a private matter, leaders and managers must be able to create environments, strategies, and indicators that promote well-being at work, which will translate into higher performance, commitment, and loyalty on the part of employees. This well-being will be reflected in the worker’s personal life, providing strong incentives for a quality life, which in turn will result in an employee being satisfied with their achievements and highly committed to their work and their organization. This is clearly expressed in the Work-life Harmony Element (Wlh) of the People and Culture at Work Domain:
“Leaders must recognize that life and work are intertwined. The focus is on creating environments where work improves life and life contributes positively to work performance. This shift in perspective fosters greater employee engagement and productivity.”
Where to start
This passport is a robust tool that provides several strategies that managers and leaders can develop to achieve this harmony between work and personal life. Among these we can mention:
- Support a work culture that fosters well-being, growth, and goals, understanding that a people-centered culture is key to organizational success
- Always encourage open communication
- Foster innovation, continuous improvement, and resilience (in people and processes)
- Flexible work practices to create a supportive environment that promotes well-being and prevents burnout
- The organization’s mission and vision must be clear to employees, who must have opportunities for development and contribution to the organization’s goals.
Other indicators
We have discussed demotivation and burnout as symptoms that the work culture needs to be improved to achieve a harmonious work-life balance. But there are also other indicators that this Wlh Element invites us to consider:
- Employee engagement levels. When high, this indicates motivated and balanced employees.
- Workload distribution. An imbalance in this area will cause stress, burnout, and mistakes at work.
- Teamwork, which makes things run smoothly and improves performance.
- Continuous learning and skill development is a sign of job satisfaction.
- Absenteeism, safety audits, and mental health at work.
- Other indicators such as high turnover, sick leave, unplanned downtime and its financial impact, overtime, reactive maintenance, among others, are symptoms of a work culture that needs to be reviewed and improved.
Knowing and understanding the relationship between personal and professional life means being one step ahead in terms of leadership (reliability, business, organizational, etc.), and the faster we master these concepts, the closer we get to excellence, accompanied by a solid, motivated, and healthy workforce.
