Maintaining a good work-life balance can be difficult,but there are ways to make sure that pressures of work responsibilities don’t have a negative impact on your mental health.
In the past year during the global pandemic, working from home has become more common. This, along with improvements in personal technology, has blurred boundaries between the office and home life. Maintaining a good work-life balance can be difficult, but there are ways to make sure that pressures of work responsibilities don’t have a negative impact on your mental health. Creating a good balance between work and leisure is important to wellbeing, yet research has shown that almost one-third of UK employees feel they don’t have a good work-life balance.
A study by the Mental Health Foundation found that with increased working hours, the mental health of employees declined, with 27% of respondents feeling depressed, 34% anxious, and 58% irritable. So, what can both employee and employer do to create a healthy culture, both inside and outside the workplace.
4 signs of an unhealthy work-life balance:
- Neglecting aspects of your life outside of work
- Constantly feeling physically or emotionally drained
- Feeling unhappy about the time you spend at work
- Regularly working long hours and taking your work home with you
4 things you could do to improve your work-life balance:
- Take advantage of any wellbeing benefits offered to you at work
- Make time outside of work for relationships and leisure
- Do what you can to look after your own mental health and wellbeing
- Take personal responsibility for your work commitments
4 things you could do as an employer:
- Encourage a culture of openness about mental health, workload and responsibilities
- Provide training and develop policies specifically related to work-life balance and mental health
- Introduce wellbeing initiatives and activities that promote a healthy work-life balance
- Promote positive messages surrounding mental health
Here at Mantell Associates we believe in hard work, but we understand the importance of a healthy work-life balance. Looking after the mental health of our employees is a top priority and is a topic that has been at the forefront of our work culture, particularly over the past year. We have introduced various initiatives that work to improve staff wellbeing, including longer lunch breaks to allow time for exercise, regular face-to-face meetings to ensure workloads are manageable, flexible working and dedicated days to work from home, team building and social activities, and many more.
Since Mantell Associates was founded in 2019, our CEO Alessandro Mantell has worked to establish the right environment and culture, the by-product of which is a positive culture, happy employees, and company-wide success.