3 Effective Strategies For Work-Life Balance For Managers

Managers and leaders find it easy to get lost amidst the chaos of professional and personal life. Hence, they need to emphasize work-life balance more than anyone else. However, even though we realize the importance of work-life balance for managers, we might fail to work on them. There are many ideas on work-life balance for managers, and you might have tried more than a few in your quest for a balanced life.

In this blog post, we will begin by understanding the meaning of work-life balance, especially for managers. Further, we will also look at three effective strategies for work-life balance to help managers and leaders achieve it.

Defining work-life balance for managers 

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to work-life balance, as everyone has different needs and priorities. Yet, we can draw a simplistic definition of work-life balance for managers. Work-life balance means you allocate sufficient time to your personal and professional life. It means giving due importance and time to activities that benefit you, and not just your career, such as hobbies, spending time with family and friends, and allowing yourself to rest.

People who maintain a healthy work-life balance focus on all aspects of their lives. Instead of focusing solely on their personal or professional life, these people strike a delicate balance. While they spend hours focusing on work, they give equal attention to their hobbies. The key is to create a distinction between work and home. It begins with creating a boundary to ensure that both things do not get mixed. At times, priorities may force you to put one over the other. But the key is to enforce that boundary through your actions repeatedly.

More than any other employee, managers can find them spread too thin all across their teams. As a result, they are forced to clock in long hours and work overtime to ensure that their team delivers on time. While this seems an effective practice, it may not be so due to the long-term negative impact of working in a haphazard style. As they have to contribute to a number of operations and ensure effective coordination throughout their teams, managers are more likely to be affected by stress and burnout. Resultantly, existential crises can occur, which push their well-being down. In such a situation, the manager is putting themselves and their teams at risk by not having a healthy work-life balance.

The conversation on work-life balance for managers restarted with renewed focus after the pandemic forced everyone to work from home. With the advent of remote work, work-life balance was thrown off kilter as the visible boundary between work and personal life was virtually erased for many people. Consequently, managers have faced more challenges in ensuring they can maintain work-life balance and prod their teammates to do the same.

Why is work-life balance important for managers?

A lack of work-life balance means you might need help to create and enforce boundaries that separate your personal and professional life. As a result, you might find yourself in a very chaotic situation – where schedules and priorities intermix and frequently clash even after the best efforts to prevent it. The impact of lacking work-life balance for managers is detrimental to the performance in many ways, primarily:

• Stress and burnout: More often than not, managers and leaders are stressed more about work than any other employee. And this does make sense most of the time, given that they are the in-charge. However, this continuous barrage of meetings and tasks allows no time for the mind to relax. As a result, they are more likely to burn out after undergoing heavy stress continuously due to working long hours in an unsustainable lifestyle.
• Lifestyle disorders: Work-life balance is essential for your mental and physical well-being. When managers do not take care of themselves sufficiently, they expose themselves to the risk of many lifestyle disorders perpetuated by strict routines imposed by their calendars. Sleep deprivation is common among people who forget to take time off work.
• Feeling overwhelmed: When a person is stuck to their computer system for hours, struggling with a complex problem, they are bound to feel overwhelmed. The never-ending surge of activities and tasks can become overwhelming for managers when they do not allow themselves sufficient time to recharge. As a result, their productivity will fall. In turn, they might even look for escapes to avoid stress-inducing things at work, leading to increased absenteeism and turnover.

Three effective strategies for work-life balance for managers

Managers face a lot of strains and stress at work. But with the right strategies for work-life balance, they can lead a healthy and balanced life. Here are three effective strategies for work-life balance you can you can use to have a healthier schedule to ensure that your physical and mental well-being are taken care of –

Manage your time and goals

The key to having a healthy work-life balance for managers is practicing time management. Having good time management skills implies that you make the best use of your time to remain efficient and generate the highest productivity for your team. It ensures that the time you spend at work is used for tangible purposes instead of getting consumed by frivolous activities like gossiping and workplace politics.

In order to make the best use of your time, you need to practice goal setting. Managers and leaders need to set and achieve smart goals. It means that your goals should be realistic and achievable while ensuring that they contribute to helping you achieve your mission. Setting deadlines and ensuring they are followed is also an essential part of this activity. You will need to track your progress and continuously attempt to make your processes more effective by learning from experience. The key is to ensure that you make the best use of your time with your team at work. Make those hours productive by providing entire focus and dedication so that you are not forced to stay up longer to get things done.

Practice effective delegation with your team

Delegation is essential to develop to balance work-life balance for managers effectively. While as a manager, you might need to be involved in everything and adopt a hands-on approach for the same, it is crucial to prioritize using your time. Take note of activities that need your participation. The others – which your teammates can adequately run independently – are the ones you need to withdraw from. Then you can use your time to focus on tasks that matter to you instead of spending time on every single job. It also helps cultivate autonomy and a sense of ownership among your team members.

Effective delegation allows you to delegate tasks or responsibilities without compromising the quality of the work produced. You can ask employees who you feel are more suited and capable of fulfilling a particular job instead of taking on the responsibility yourself. It also involves setting clear expectations about what should be accomplished so that everyone involved understands their role in carrying out the assigned task. Doing this will ensure you are not stretched too thin over everything your team does.

Set healthy boundaries that help you achieve your purpose

Setting healthy boundaries at work is vital to building a work-life balance for managers. Boundaries should be based on your values and what you feel best suits your needs as a professional. You need to determine what hours of the day are best for you- after all, if work takes up too much time, it will also detract from time spent with your loved ones or interests outside of work. Boundaries will help you maintain and enforce the balance. You can communicate your needs to others so that they give you adequate space to function as well.

It is also essential that you understand why you were hired and the specific job responsibilities that were outlined when accepting the offer. Once these basics have been covered, setting boundaries can become easier by clarifying what you are willing to work on and when. Of course, keep in mind that your boundaries are not a way to give up on your duties. Instead, they are a tool to help you perform better in your role.

Conclusion

Balance in life is key to happiness. Therefore, healthy life at work and beyond needs balance too. Maintaining work-life balance is especially crucial for managers because they are more prone to overworking than anyone else. Hence, we have identified three critical strategies for work-life balance that managers and leaders can use to ensure that they can create and enforce a healthy balance that allows them to take care of their physical and mental well-being.

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