How to Support Your People When Work and Life Collide

Putting a focus on employee work-life balance is not something we typically associate with strategic human resource planning. But in my experience, providing support to employees with respect to their family lives is key to building a thriving workplace culture.

We’ve all learned a lot about supporting employees in their life-outside-work this year. Seemingly overnight, businesses have had to shift to remote working arrangements, and those newly remote employees have had to grapple with “work life” and “home life” colliding.

Here is where leaders can really step up and make it a priority to support their employees in every aspect of their lives — for everyone’s benefit.

Compassion and Empathy Build Powerful Connections

Supporting your employees as they juggle personal and professional commitments goes beyond merely helping them work remotely. To be clear, helping your teams stay connected and productive in a remote work arrangement is important — but so is acknowledging that people may be facing challenges in their personal lives, and that those pressures might impact their professional lives too.

Whatever policies and processes your organization puts in place around employee work-life balance, compassion and empathy should be the guiding principles.

Why? Because they open a door to a deeper connection. Listening with what I call “compassionate empathy” allows you to connect with an employee who needs help, in a way that makes them feel seen and heard. It establishes trust.

You’re not only their leader, you’re their trusted ally.

When a struggling employee feels that you care about them, they’ll be more honest about their situation. You, in turn, will have more information and a better sense of how you can support them.

I can’t stress enough how impactful this can be. Receiving this kind of help and understanding from an employer bonds that person to the organization. Feeling valued and supported leads to stronger engagement and ultimately, higher productivity. But over the long-term, it builds loyalty — you’ll have lower employee turnover, and all the costs that go with it. 

Intentional Support Leads to a Stronger Workplace Culture

It’s easy to claim that you’re “there” for your employees with whatever challenges they’re facing — but what does it look like in practical terms? I’d like to offer a few tips on how to embed this philosophy into your everyday work culture, and make sure your organization continues to thrive.

Set expectations and communicate them clearly

First, it’s important that you and your leadership team get clear on your general expectations around balancing work and family life for your team. Next, it’s imperative that you communicate them across the organization.

The actual policies you implement are up to you. Do you want to establish core working hours, during which you expect employees to be available for meetings? Do you want to make it clear that you don’t expect employees to answer work emails after hours? Be as specific as you can. Your employees want to do the right thing, but leaving them guessing at a time when the lines between work life and home life are getting blurred can lead to a lot of confusion and unease. 

The other advantage of being clear and up front is that you’re explicitly acknowledging that your employees do have lives outside of work, and that you respect the importance of their personal commitments.

Maintain an open door policy 

Many leaders claim that their “door is always open” — but this is an area where it’s very important to walk the talk. The fact is, problems will arise. And if someone on your team is experiencing difficulties, you want to know about it sooner rather than later.

The key is to create an atmosphere that fosters trust and sharing. Check in with your employees regularly. Be proactive in letting them know that you’re there to support them in whatever they need. This must be more than just corporate policy: It has to come through in the way you communicate as well — in the words you use, your body language, and the tone of your voice. 

Keep in mind that it isn’t easy to ask for help, particularly if the root cause is outside of work. No one wants to be seen as a weak link. The last thing you want is for an employee to suffer in silence and only come forward for help when they’ve reached their breaking point. So let them know you have an open door policy — and mean it.

Cross-train your employees

If an employee does come to you with a personal challenge and needs some extra support (or even time off work), you need to have some mitigation strategies in place to make that support real. 

One good way to pre-empt operational disruptions is to cross-train your employees. This is a best practice for business continuity scenarios, but I think it’s an excellent strategy for supporting employees too.

This isn’t only about ensuring that the work still gets done in the event that an employee needs to step back for personal reasons. An employee who is already struggling to keep up may feel an additional sense of guilt or failure about dropping the ball — but if they know that someone else is already trained and ready to take up the slack, that pressure is eased a little. In fact, it may even prompt them to flag the issue to you earlier, rather than scrambling to keep all the balls in the air.

And as a bonus, cross-training your employees is a form of professional development. It encourages collaboration and growth, fosters a sense of teamwork, and can lead to more innovation down the road — all while spreading the risk of a key person going out of commission.

Taking Care of Your Employees Is Taking Care of Business

As challenging as this year has been, I actually see it as a huge opportunity for leaders. It’s a chance to renew your commitment to supporting your employees in all aspects of their lives, and embed that commitment into the workplace culture. Let’s choose optimism. Sowing those seeds now will reap huge benefits in the future.