The Mental Health Foundation ran a survey around work-life balance and found several indicators that an imbalance between the respondents time spent at work versus spending time on their personal life can cause significant problems. One of the biggest and most evident results was that the higher amount of hours a person works, the more their feelings of unhappiness increase.
With this close connection between a person’s work-life balance and their overall wellbeing, employers promoting and supporting a good balance is key.
How you do this will depend on your company and each individual employee’s needs. A good way that every company can support their employees is through their employee benefits package. There are many great benefits available that can support employees in a range of situations.
Health
Worrying about our health and the health of our loved ones can mean that we spend a lot of our free time worrying or at appointments. This build-up not only adds stress but gives us less time to relax and switch off.
Having some health-based employee benefits can take away some of the stress. There are options to help you with wait times, medical treatment costs and health assessments. As there are so many health-based employee benefits, your employees are likely to find something to support them.
Wellbeing
The survey mentioned at the beginning of this article also stated that the more time you spend at work, the more time outside of work hours you’re likely to spend thinking about your work. This can be detrimental in the long term because it will become harder to switch off over time.
Being able to create a good work-life balance is important because it will support us in not bringing work stresses home with us. We all need time to relax and spend time with our loved ones, so creating boundaries is vital. Particularly if an employee is working remotely, the boundaries are easier than ever to break.
Giving your employees access to wellbeing support can be beneficial in several ways. Even if creating a good work-life balance is a priority for someone, it can be hard to know how to do so. Access to wellbeing support can help pinpoint certain behaviours that encourage working too much, like pinning too much of their worth to their productivity, as it gives them a judgement-free zone to discuss these issues and explore with a mental health professional the reasons for their behaviours. For example, pressure to get good grades from parents when in education.
Employees can then come up with a better plan going forward. Having someone they trust knowing their aims too can help keep them accountable to their promise to be more balanced. Most will talk to a family member or friend, but some do not have this support network or find talking to people that they know hard, so having access to a trusted health professional can be beneficial.
Something that you can do personally for your employees is giving them access to a healthy living library on your employee benefits platform. This is free to use the library of facts and advice about a range of different topics.
Financial
One of the big draws of working extra hours is the promised higher salary. Employees are more likely to work longer and neglect their social life if they have money worries. Helping your employees financially through your benefits package is a sustainable way to support them.
The first one is similar to the healthy living library in that it’s a financial wellbeing library. This resource provides your employees with financial advice and information and because you can include a wide range of support for various financial topics, the library can help employees in many different situations.
Similar to the healthy living library, a library of information like this can be hosted on your employee benefits platform.
Holiday Trading
Making the most of your allotted paid time off is great but adding extra days off is even better! With the Holiday Trading scheme employees can easily buy more with a small amount of their monthly gross pay.
An issue when it comes to creating a good work-life balance is just simply not having enough time. Being able to book more time off from work and know you have the extra flexibility can help support this, particularly if some of your holidays are spent for big life events, you can make more time for little adventures or relaxation too!
As well as a focus on how much free time a person has, you can help to support an employee in how they spend it. The ability to have a safe and fun time off work will make any annual leave count.
Here are some ideas of how you can use your benefits package to ensure your employees make the most of their time off:
Car Scheme and MotorSave
One way for employees to achieve a good work-life balance is by going on trips and also being able to get all of their errands done. Doing this with a reliable vehicle is easier and readily available for any last-minute plans.
A car lease scheme allows employees to get a brand-new car that can be changed to their specifications (subject to availability). This gives them the freedom to travel to different places easily, making time for what counts!
As great as it is to have your own mode of transport, keeping up with its maintenance can be stressful. With the MotorSave scheme, your employees can pay for their car maintenance through an amount taken from their monthly salary.
Providing both of these benefits can be great in terms of helping employees make the most of their free time!
Bike Scheme
Cars are obviously a great mode of transport but for some people, they enjoy a revitalizing ride out on their bike. Fortunately, there is a scheme for this too!
The Bike Scheme allows employees to lease a bike and get accessories for it too! This gives the freedom to try the bike out and then keep or return it, allowing the flexibility to benefit from the perks of bike rides when needed.
Discounts
Having more time to spend on your personal life can potentially become expensive. The price of fun can be high!
Providing your employees with discounts for different types of shopping and experiences gives them way more freedom. Employees get the chance to go on more days out and holidays for less, spend less on their weekly shopping and treat themselves and their loved ones. We hope that this article gave you some ideas as to how you can use your employee benefits package to create a good work-life balance amongst your employees.
Visit our website for more ideas and information from a trusted provider of employee benefits!