Self-care can be hard to prioritize, especially for many people struggling with their work-life balance. You’re not alone if your personal and professional boundaries have disintegrated over the past 18 or 20 months of “new normal.” It’s hard to shift between business and home mindsets when you’re working from home. These loose boundaries ultimately hurt professional performance as well as personal happiness. It’s more important than ever before to take care of ourselves! Channel your inner productivity expert and learn our time management expert-approved tips to add self-care back into your team's lives.
Establish Reasonable Boundaries
Setting realistic boundaries is your first step to starting a self-care routine. It’s not sustainable, productive, or reasonable for employees to always be accessible. Many work teams fell into this mindset at the beginning of the pandemic. Maybe you felt pressure to prove you could still perform during a global crisis. Extended work hours were a normal coping mechanism.
However, ask any corporate organization expert and you’ll see a clear trend. Employees who are always “on” eventually start to struggle. From the physical exhaustion of putting in 14 hour days, to social isolation due to prioritizing work over friends and family, to mental burnout, poor boundaries cause many problems.
Encourage your team to define collective boundaries. Establish a reasonable timeframe when employees should be available. This window will look different in some situations. If you work with global partners, you won’t have the same coverage needs as a team with exclusively local clients. However, all workgroups need to set and understand their expectations. This is where a time management or productivity expert’s help can come in especially handy.
Respect Non-Working Hours
After your team decides on group working hours, you also need a plan to protect your time away from work. Downtime gives employees the chance to decompress, recharge, and connect with friends and family. Your team needs time for social activities, errands, physical exercise, creative pursuits, family obligations, and more.
Become a holistic productivity expert when it comes to your team. Personal activities have major mental, emotional, and health benefits that ripple throughout an employee’s life. Your team will be happier, more satisfied, and more productive when you make room for their outside interests.
Lead By Example
As your team’s time management expert, you need to lead by example. Be mindful of the working boundaries you’ve established, then make sure to live by these guidelines. If your team agreed not to contact each other after the close of business, don’t answer emails from bed. Employees take cues from their leadership. Encourage your team to make time for self-care by prioritizing your own boundaries.
Be prepared for some growing pains as you go through this process. You’ll need to consider availability, accessibility, workloads, and more. There may be times when boundaries flex and work plays a bigger role in your team’s lives. For example, you might work long hours under a looming project deadline, or when a client has an emergency. Expectations will also vary based on your industry, time zones, and other factors.
Remember that it’s not healthy for your team to work until burnout. Always return to more reasonable work hours once your project is complete or your client emergency is solved. This conscious restructuring gives your employees the mental resources to make the most of their off-hours. Your team can build replenishing self-care routines when you show you value their time.
Invest In Your Teams With Boundaries And Self-Care
Workers struggle physically, emotionally, personally, and professionally when they don’t have clear work-life boundaries. Encourage your team to take care of themselves by prioritizing reasonable boundaries and self-care practices. These simple changes can refresh your team, keep people engaged, and help you stay productive, no matter what the coming months bring.