Recent years have brought focus to the need for work-life balance in our lifestyles, which has proven crucial to our careers and personal lives as well.
The ability to strike this balance relies on flexibility. The lack of flexibility is likely to affect the performance of employees.
It is especially important in the modern work environment, as long working hours, combined with constant stress, can lead to workplace burnout.
In addition to fatigue and mood swings, burnout can eventually lead to irritability, as well as decreased performance at work.
Flexible work environments can help counter this and enable better performance, higher employee retention, and a more satisfied workforce, thereby improving profitability for businesses.
However, managing your work and personal lives simultaneously can be challenging. Time management and balancing your energy between work and home can be difficult, especially with constraints such as a long commute, family obligations, or varied working hours from your partner.
Work-life balance can be even harder to measure, as working parents’ views on striking the right balance can be different from those of recent graduates, starting a career in a new city.
Similarly, the goal of achieving the right balance varies considerably among singles and married people, as well as young and older professionals.
In addition, flexible employment encompasses not just full-time jobs with flexible hours, but also part-time jobs, which have become increasingly convenient over time.
All employees have the option of choosing when and where to work. Moreover, employers are increasingly offering flexible work hours as a workplace benefit in recent years.
In addition to part-time and reduced working hours, flexibility can also be achieved through flexi-time, which allows employees to choose their own working hours within a predetermined limit; job sharing, which allocates one full-time job to two or more employees; working from home (fully or partly); or mobile working, in which employees need not travel to their workplace.
Other formats also include employees working at locations outside of their workplaces or residences, be it clients’ offices or remote locations during travel, shift swapping, and annualised hours, where employees’ working hours are calculated on an hourly, rather than daily or weekly basis, as determined by their employer during the year.
Inflexibility and rigidity towards changing trends could lead an employer to losing out on a great candidate.
Flexibility to ensure a work-life balance can be a driving force for candidates to perform better at their jobs, as they are more engaged in the tasks they handle.
While it has its drawbacks, such as the difficulty of promising something you cannot deliver due to pressure or other factors, evaluating and offering employee flexibility in an organisation is vital now and for the future.
Diamond Fares, founder and managing director of Onpoint.
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