What does work-life balance mean to your employees?

If you have 400 employees, you have around 400 different opinions about what constitutes a good work-life balance. So, how do you go about identifying which ones are the most crucial and what is your plan of action going forward, to address these issues?

After more than 30 years of working with shift workers and shiftwork operations, I recognize that when unemployment drops below 6%, recruiting and keeping a skilled workforce becomes a major challenge.  Nationally, unemployment is below 4% which translates into “There is no one out there to hire so we need to make sure we keep the people we have.”   

When it comes to improving retention for shift workers, paying attention to and respecting the need for their work-life balance has to be on the top of the list.  If you decide to take action, you not only need to be aware of their “wish list”, your workers’ preferences, but you must be able to distinguish between important and less important necessities, between inconsequential and real issues.

To help with this process we developed a Work-Life Balance Survey, the tool that gets the job done. It measures and quantifies what’s important, what has significance and separates the background noise from the real message. Our surveys cover a wide array of topics with questions ranging from sleep patterns, through overtime preferences and wages, to communications and inclusiveness.  Not only will you understand what your workforce thinks of these matters and what their main concerns are, but you will also be able to compare their preferences and perceptions to that of the average shift worker.  This will highlight your strengths as well as those areas that need more attention.  This is the exact information you need to improve the work-life balance for your employees.

To get a glimpse of what this looks like in the survey, here is an illustration of a summary of responses to the question “Do you depend on overtime to make ends meet?”

However, the work is not done here, as the financial, operational, and organizational goals need to be aligned with the human resource aspects of the newly found priorities.  Leaders also use the survey outcomes as input to formulate an action plan – as to what to implement next for improved worker retention. Shiftwork Solution experts have a proven method of walking management through these steps with ease to arrive at a clear, streamlined, and feasible action plan. 

In short, if you want to improve the work-life balance of your employees, ask them first what is important to them.  Don’t rely on the sound of the loud minority.  Don’t ignore the silent majority.  Get everyone involved.

We had a recent client say, “Before your survey, we did a company-wide employee survey at every one of our sites.  Your survey gave us far and away more insight into our employees than that corporate survey did.”

We’d love to talk with you about how we can help you find those insights and decide what to do next.  We can customize, interpret, and implement the Shiftworker Work-Life Balance Survey at your facility for an improved retention plan.

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005 or complete our contact form and we will call you.