Work-life balance analytics

What does work/life balance mean? 
Work-life balance is about effectively splitting the time between work and personal life to enable a healthy lifestyle. Maintaining a good work-life balance helps in stress reduction and prevents burnout. 
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Why is measuring work-life harmony important? 
According to a study by Research Gate, employees who work more than 9 hours a day are more prone to mental and physical issues as well as burnout. They are also less capable to deal with more complex challenges and tend to have a higher attrition rate. 

Why is a good work-life balance important in terms of shifting to remote work? 
‍Remote work has further blurred the line between work and personal life. Going to an office on a daily basis helps us create a clear distinction between work and free time. Unlike when we work from home as it’s hard to decide when our working hours end. It’s hard for employees to fully disconnect – every email and notification causes a disruption to their free time. This contributes to a cognitive workload, leaving them less time to relax and recharge. 
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We can clearly see that the FOMO attitude is gaining strength – people feel the need to be constantly available. This gives them a fake sense of being in full control, and on top of things. They believe that such an attitude positively reflects on their work image. It’s necessary that employers clearly communicate to employees that they are not expected to be on constant standby. But they should deliver high quality work within the agreed timeframe. 
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If you put the right collaboration rituals in place you’ll instill a sense of belonging in your employees. They will also know what’s expected of them, which will increase transparency and lead to more trust. All of this will contribute to creating work-life harmony, which in the long run will prevent depression, burnout and high turnover. 

What are the numbers describing work-life balance now? 
To get a better overview of this situation, let’s take a look at some statistics. 94% of employees admit that they work over 50 hours a week, and almost 50% say they work over 65 hours. This clearly shows that a lot needs to be done in the area of work-life balance. 

Practical data-driven insights about a work-life balance for a leader and a team:
Here are a few metrics that you can take a look at to verify if you offer the right work-life balance at your organization. 

• After hours meetings 
  ‍To calculate it, take a look at the meetings which take place past working hours. Include all employees, irrespective of their seniority level. This will tell you how your employee's workday looks like.
  
• Emails after hours
  ‍Count all the emails sent from your domain during the week, and filter out the emails which were sent outside of working hours.
  
• Workday length
  ‍To calculate this metric, account for the average number of hours between the first and last work activity per day.
  
• Time since last balanced week
  ‍How can you tell whether your employees had ‘a balanced week’? Look at their weekly calendar. Did they work for more than 9 hours on any day of the work week? If so, then you can assume that your team is suffering from work overload and need to do additional research to understand why. Overall, a balanced week is one where no one is working a minute longer than 9 hours.
  

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