Work-Life Balance Requires Respect, Trust And Choice By Everyone
/Organizations are continuing to struggle finding ways to address the reality that for a company to succeed, employees need to feel like their leaders care about them. This is a struggle because businesses can’t survive if all they do is care for your employees. Instead, the business – employee relationship must be a delicate balance of respect, trust, clear expectations, flexibility, collaboration and choice.
The question is, "What is the balance between employee needs and business needs?"
Take work-life balance and flexible hours in an office environment as an example. Some employees may work the early part of the day from 7AM to 3PM as their regular hours. Other employees may be on a later schedule from 11AM to 7PM. That is terrific, but what happens when you have to schedule a project meeting and the only time everyone is available is 9:30AM except for the one person whose regular, agreed upon start time is 11AM?
I believe the answer exists within the above mentioned balance of respect, trust, clear expectations, flexibility, collaboration and choice.
In this example:
Respect and trust mean that everyone can be confident that there was a serious attempt to find a time during everyone’s typical work hours. They also mean that everyone will respect and trust each other and previous agreements.
Clear expectations means that everyone knows that if someone can’t make a meeting – no matter what the reason – the person who can’t attend will understand and respect that the meeting must still take place.
Flexibly, collaboration and choice mean the person who has the conflict has the opportunity – and the responsibility to make one of the following three choices:
Choose to make a special adjustment and attend the meeting.
Choose to assign an alternate person to represent and speak for them.
Choose to be OK receiving the meeting minutes and support any decisions made.
For organizations to succeed they (and by extension the leaders AND every employee), must make each employee feel like their success as employees AND as individuals matters. Employees at every level must feel valued and be proud they are part of the team. This is what it means to build a strong corporate culture where difficult decisions and difficult conversations can actually be prevented.
When people feel valued and proud, they become more creative, more collaborative and more loyal. Nobody should be treated as disposable cogs in a machine that exist only to do their j.o.b. and obey.
One last thing – leadership requires intentionality! As a leader, even if you are not in a leadership position (yet), you must focus on the well-being of others and what you can do to inspire them (and yourself) to greatness. Being a great leader takes conscious effort to find balance between the ever-changing business goals and employee needs… all the time… everyday.
Thank you for reading ‘Work-Life Balance Requires Respect, Trust and Choice By Everyone’. If you have a moment, please let us know, “How do you respect work-life balance?”
Bruce
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Toronto corporate trainer and executive coach Bruce Mayhew Consulting is in the people business… it just so happens that training and/or executive coaching is involved. Let us help you improve your productivity and employee engagement.
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