How to Facilitate Work-Life Balance for Remote Employees
Prevent burnout by providing a positive employee experience
October 18, 2022
A recent survey found that 56% of employees feel burned out in the workplace. Burnout is when you feel so exhausted from the plethora of tasks on your plate that even taking time off doesn’t help you replenish the energy you need to focus.
Since it’s difficult for employees to recover after experiencing burnout, it’s important to prevent it from happening in the first place. Here’s how you can foster an achievable work-life balance for your employees within a remote workplace.
Tip #1: Allow Your Employees to Work Asynchronously
When you provide flexibility in your employees’ working hours, they are more likely to work during the time they feel most productive. For example, if a colleague feels more energetic in the early morning, then the rate at which they complete tasks would increase if they were able to work during this time.
When your workforce chooses their own schedules, they're able to spend more time on their hobbies they would otherwise miss out on. When employees feel enriched in their personal lives, they come back to work more rejuvenated and with improved focus throughout the week.
With Swit, you are able to create a Roll Book channel, letting everyone know whether you are on or offline if someone needs to get in contact with you. You can also leave a message to your coworkers for them to see the next time they log on, allowing you to collaborate even when working in different time zones.
With this flexibility, they're able to work wherever they feel most creative or productive at any given time. Employees would even be able to take an extended trip to visit family or friends by communicating a temporary time zone change to work from a different geographic location.
Tip #2: Create Chat Channels to Share Interests
At Swit, we create chat channels that cater toward our employees’ hobbies and interests. Our Furry Friends channel is for employees who want to talk about their pets and our Fun Recommendations channel gives people the opportunity to recommend and discuss their favorite books, movies, shows, and more with their colleagues.
Providing employees with some more casual chat channels encourages them to bond with their coworkers and create friendships that could move outside the workplace. When colleagues are able to get to know one another through team activities, they become more comfortable sharing ideas for collaborative projects like social media posts, engineering blueprints, or website design.
Tip #3: Encourage Employees to Take Breaks Throughout The Day
Taking breaks helps employees replenish the energy they need to concentrate on daily tasks. Our employees are able to clock out when they need to for doctor’s visits, extended lunches, children’s sporting events, and more. Employees can then shift that working time to later in the day, allowing them to better balance their work responsibilities with their personal lives.
With Swit, you can tag your team on a task card before you take a break in order to update them on a project’s progress and let them know when you’ll be back. This gives a clear timeline for when you expect colleagues to provide feedback, so that when you return to work all you need to do is check your notifications for their reactions and comments.
Tip #4: Communicate Regularly with Your Team
Weekly meetings should be a comfortable place for employees to check in with you about their workload. They can clarify the time they need to get projects done, talk to you about any vacation time they are taking that may require an adjustment to their deadlines, and more.
By promoting transparency and open communication within the workplace, your colleagues should feel more comfortable expressing their needs so they can attend both work and personal events throughout the day. If your workplace uses Swit, you are able to drag and drop meetings into chat channels or attach meetings to task cards to support alignment on a project.
You’re also able to post your daily or weekly goals into chat channels in order to cut back on unnecessary meetings. Then, let your colleagues know of your weekly goals during your regular sync meetings, and keep track of their progress via our Swit Goals plug-in.
Tip #5: Encourage Employees to Take Time Off
It's important that employees are provided with paid time off to be able to go on vacation, spend time with their families, rest while they are sick, and take mental health days when needed. Providing employees with a generous amount of PTO days clearly communicates to them that the company cares about their well being. We also recently implemented new PTO plans, including a winter recess and summer half-day Friday, based on employee suggestions.
With Swit, employees can submit a request for PTO using the Approvals plug-in regarding the days they are taking off, utilizing multiple levels of the approval process to keep both their manager and HR representative informed. The plug-in also has functionality to create custom templates for approvals, which is a helpful way to provide instructions for submission or indicate who to tag at which level. If an employee wants to travel to Hawaii for a weeklong vacation, they can simply fill in a vacation template indicating the dates away and submit it to management.
This provides leadership with the information they need so they are able to delegate tasks for current and upcoming projects. The employee requesting time off can choose to have their request circulated to a specific team, or share an Approval request to a chat channel for transparency.
While this colleague is away, they can turn on Do Not Disturb mode in Swit so they're truly able to unplug from notifications while enjoying their trip to Hawaii. When they come back, they can share their photos from Hawaii in a casual chat channel to show coworkers what they did on their vacation.
We hope that these tips will help guide your company in creating a culture that provides employees with more of a work-life balance. Swit has the project management tools you need to collaborate with your team, even when working a different schedule. Contact Swit today to learn more.
Ashley Mae Orcutt, Creative Copywriter
