The idea of work-life balance has gained a lot of popularity in recent years as millennials have entered the workplace. Working a 9 to 5 and then going home and turning off work is getting harder thanks to mobile connectivity. Instead of looking at work and life as two separate places, what happens when we start examining them as intertwined pattern woven together. Each strand has a different color, a different meaning, but when woven together, produces a beautiful pattern. When our work-life balance is working, this pattern is really nice to look at. When it’s well…we usually start looking for another job but we don’t really ever think about what went wrong in the process.
As a manager, if you can extend your empathy out and start focusing on creating a family environment in the office, you’ll find the benefits rewarding. This attitude will help you as a manager start to feel less stress because you’re not trying to compartmentalize people and things and instead, viewing them as an organic extension of your mission and values.
Here are three ideas for a more balanced workplace:
- Trust as a foundation. Establishing trust as a major element of your team is key to getting the most out of employees in your organization. What you can see in a lot of organizations are elements for creating distrust. Although time sheets are required for billing, and open floor plans are more efficient, your employees may feel like they’re constantly being watched. Although some of these tools and strategies may be operational necessities, creating ways to make a workplace feel like a place of trust are even more important than ever.
- Failure is okay. Not only should failures (big and small) be okay, but the lessons learned should be rewarded. If your team is pushing limits to their creativity, there are bound to be some failures along the way. At Facebook, “Fail Faster,” was a key mantra. The faster the Facebook team failed, the quicker they got to the right solution. The main point being, once your team gets over the fear of failure, solutions and success come faster.
- Have a framework to work through disagreements. In many organizations, the fear of conflict can paralyze progress. As a team, it’s important to have a framework for working through problems so these issues don’t fester and create blocks in your team’s productivity.
Working and winning projects can be an intense process. Long hours and tight deadlines can really create a lot of drama for proposal teams. In order to keep the team working well, a deep foundation of trust, openness to failures, and a framework to work through disagreements are all key to making sure a team survives all of the bumps in the road. Contact us for more help with training your proposal team.