Ask the experts: how can employers improve employee retention through better work/life balance?

Employee burnout is on the rise. According to a study by Indeed, over half (52%) of survey respondents are experiencing burnout in 2021—up from the 43% who said the same in Indeed’s pre-Covid-19 survey. Employee burnout has begun to equally affect the employer. Losing an employee to burnout is costly and it can become a major strain on the other employees as they are forced to pick up the workload. This fatigue is seemingly a reflection of workers’ struggle to find work-life balance during the pandemic. What 3 tips do you have for employers who wish to improve employee retention through better work/life balance?

At College Recruiter, we recently asked our Content Expert Board that same question. Here are three tips from Ahva Sadeghi of Symba.

1. Prioritize wellness and psychological safety for your employees.

A work environment that prioritizes mental and physical wellness and psychological safety, where employees feel comfortable challenging the status quo, asking for help, and being themselves without fear of retribution, is likely to lead to better work/life balance. As an added benefit, according to a study by Google, the highest-performing teams have one main thing in common: psychological safety.

Some ways that you can foster mental and physical wellness and psychological safety to lead to better work/life balance include:

• Offer mental health days and generous sick days.
• Implement a generous PTO policy, and encourage employees to take PTO.
• Consider closing the office for a week if the winter holidays are a slow season for the business, or if there’s another time of year that’s particularly slow for business.
• Establish safe spaces for employees to connect, such as affinity groups or employee resource groups.
• Create wellness programs or partner with an organization to offer one.
• Offer paid maternal and paternal leave so that parents can spend time with their children without having to take PTO or disability leave.

2. Train your managers on work/life balance best practices.

Good managers are crucial to employee retention. Research by McKinsey shows that leaders play an important role in nurturing psychological safety in the workplace, and that consultative and supportive leadership behaviors contribute to a positive team climate. It’s important that those in leadership roles at your organization are up-to-date with and are implementing the best practices to promote work/life balance for their direct reports.

Train and encourage your managers to:

• Focus on productivity rather than work hours.
• Regularly evaluate workloads to understand which direct reports are overworked and which have capacity.
• Encourage breaks throughout the workday.
• Disengage from their direct reports during weekends, holidays, sick days, and PTO.
• Model good work/life balance behaviors. Managers should take breaks during the day, take PTO, use mental health and sick days as needed, and avoid signing on during holidays to show their direct reports that these behaviors are not only accepted but encouraged.

3. Survey your employees to find out what they want in terms of work/life balance.

What better way to understand if your employees are feeling burned out and how to mitigate burnout than to ask them directly? According to research by Sage, only 12% of workers are asked what will improve their work experiences on a regular basis. Create an anonymous survey to gauge how your employees are feeling and if there are any work/life balance policies and wellness benefits they would like to see at your company.

Take those survey results and implement real changes. If your employees express that they’re experiencing high levels of burnout, you could plan a company “field day”, a surprise holiday, a meditation workshop, or yoga class in the near future. Use the survey to understand what you might need to do in the long-run. For example, if a large portion of your employees suggested that having volunteer days or wellness benefits would help them feel more work/life balance, you should work to implement these initiatives. Listening to your employees is key to combating burnout.

— Ahva Sadeghi is a passionate social entrepreneur and co-founder of Symba, a venture backed and all-female founded tech startup focused on the future of work. Ahva is an economist and researcher focused on remote work and workforce development.