Your hybrid team allows great flexibility when working for your company. Since it’s a new working model, your team members may need time to settle down and adapt to this way of working. To ensure they adapt well; you need to assist them in maintaining a work-life balance.
What Is A Work-life Balance?
When team members can devote an equal amount of time and energy to both professional and personal pursuits, they can establish a work-life balance. They are able to get things done at home and at the office without overspending too much time on the other. It means they can still enjoy leisure activities, have time with friends and family, and enjoy one’s personal or social interests.
Others consider work-life balance as having the choice and flexibility to work on core hours, access the workplace, or go into remote working. And because of that, many companies have adopted such a concept. However, you can tweak it into the hybrid working model to keep their workplace attractive for potential talents and accommodate the needs of their employees.
How To Attain Work-Life Balance
However, you must also ensure that your employees won’t get burned out from the whole experience. Some may feel exhausted since they are used to solely working at home or the office to stay focused. As such, you may want to consider the following tips to create a work-life balance with your hybrid team:
1. Communicate The Change With Your Team
Before implementing a hybrid working model, it’s best to communicate effectively with the people affected by such a change. Ensure you provide clear information, address the key questions, and communicate effectively. That way, you can prepare them to adapt to the new changes in the working model. Effective communication will also prevent your employees from resisting, but instead, it can secure cooperation while transitioning to the hybrid working model.
In addition, it’d be best to provide your team with resources to overcome or manage the transition so that you can resolve their concerns. When communicating how the hybrid working model will work, you can create a supportive environment to improve their outlook. It can also help lower their stress levels, which is essential if you want them to have a better work-life balance. Having stress-free work is also one way how to prevent employee burnout.
2. Create Working Hours And Focused Time
One way to separate personal and work life between team members is to establish a period when they should be working. The working hours should apply to everyone so that all their concerns will be addressed at the said schedule and not at any time. Doing this will also wisely divide time based on your company’s workload and preferences, allowing employees with different working hours to adjust.
You should also set focused time, which is usually within working hours. The difference is that focused time means no one should be able to disturb you, so you can have uninterrupted work to complete all your tasks. It’s also a way to set boundaries for other team members who may be requesting chats or requests from other members that could interrupt the former.
Thus, it’s vital to have a calendar so everyone can easily access the schedule of every team member. You can also use the working hours to set brainstorming sessions, meetings, or calls without interrupting their focus when working.
3. Develop An Empowering Culture
Empowering company culture will also help protect a team member’s work-life balance since it can create harmony between team members. It means that they can grow and learn despite their differences by giving them opportunities to collaborate successfully. One of these is making sure that both on-site and remote workers get the same level of attention, time, and opportunities.
Also, make sure the hybrid team’s culture prioritizes high-quality output over long hours in the office. Allow your team to become more productive by focusing on the quality of work, whether at home or in the office, as a requisite of team member work performance. And that’s a way to allow multiple variations brought by a hybrid working model that your company culture can adopt. Doing this also allows you to address each team member’s situation so they can perform better, allowing them to become stress-free.
For instance, you can use technology to digitize collaboration between the hybrid team. That way, even at home or in the office, each individual can cooperate when working with the on-site employees. Consider using communications software solutions and online work platforms to keep all employees connected when sharing goals and values.
The best thing about online platforms and software is that you can customize them to focus on your company’s needs. By eliminating unnecessary repetition, you may boost productivity, overall efficiency, and team member well-being. When individuals can work on more important tasks instead of repetitive tasks, they won’t get overwhelmed or stressed out since they can finish all their responsibilities without using much of their personal time.
4. Eliminate Time-wasting
Most importantly, you should eliminate time-wasting that can hurdle productivity in any working environment, especially the team members working at home. For instance, distractions like taking a 10-minute coffee break at home can turn into an hour or so. You can prevent this by giving a monitored time limit to how your work-from-home employees spend their coffee breaks. That way, you can help them from slacking off.
One time-wasting activity that may distract employees in the office setting is ‘chatting’ with other team members. Thus, you should restrict your team members from utilizing personal communication apps to contact other employees or anyone outside work.
Conclusion
A hybrid team can be helpful in your company as they can become more productive since they can focus on finishing their tasks instead of spending time in the office. However, you should also assist them in striking a balance between their personal and professional lives to reduce their stress levels. There are many ways to do it, but the ones mentioned above are common. Try them now and see how they can help your team.
Leave a comment