Integrate Life And Work To Increase Productivity, Performance, Profitability, and Attendance

In today’s economic climate, it seems to be a challenge for organizations who finally understood the need and created cultures that support a work and life balance for their employees, to follow through. After years of demanding high productivity and increasing on the job hours and expectations and not achieving the hoped-for better results, companies finally embraced polices and procedures that support employees in integrating their life and work experience. The results brought higher productivity, better employee overall job performance, and fewer employee absences, resulting in greater profitability.

Now, some companies are neglecting these progressive improvements, basing each decision on fear, diminished profits, and always the possibility of downsizing looming. In such a culture, there is no room for perceived extravagances such as work/life balance programs for employees. They should be lucky just to have a job, right?

Well, wrong. Those same companies still require employees and if they don’t want to lose their best ones, they still need to take care of them, not only to keep them, but to encourage healthy productivity.

When companies first consider such programs, their biggest concern is how programs supporting life and work balance will help their bottom line versus simply costing more money that they don’t want to spend. As more companies develop creative methods for integration of life and work, they see that the bottom line can’t be impacted upon positively without recognizing employees’ needs for balance.

Initially, there is resistance to work/life concepts as some companies feel it is simply an added expense for them. In addition, they’ve seen the need for balance as anemployee issue and not a company issue. The truth is that avoiding responsibility for integration of life and work is what is actually COSTING companies money, and if they’d invest some money in programs that support balance, they’d increase their bottom line through improved morale and productivity. Employees are humans with families and lives to live; not robots or machines that just require the occasional oiling.

Here is a reminder of the valuable reasons that organizations adopt life/work balance policies:

  • Employee hiring and retention: it is more difficult to recruit and replace employees if there isn’t a balance in their job, as they leave faster when they feel imbalance and the cost of constant retraining is money that could be better spent elsewhere.
  • Absenteeism decrease: when there is flexitime, flexible schedules, childcare, etc. offered, it is well documented that absenteeism and tardiness go way down.
  • Stress is decreased: on the job tension often comes from the feeling of being out of balance, and stress creates illness, poor morale, and low productivity. People are not robots that can be switched on and off at will. All work and no play certainly does make Jack a dull boy.
  • Attitude and morale: employees who have a integration in life/work show higher job satisfaction, greater productivity, feel more loyalty, and file fewer law suits.

    • Organizations are more successful when they realize that without high quality, loyal workers who feel integration between family and work, they won’t have a dedicated workforce, and they will lose money. At the end of the day, it is still people who can make or break a business, and good people are still worth keeping and developing.