Work-Life Balance is About Setting and Achieving the Right Goals Work and life are balancing acts. Your resources are finite, and if you push yourself too hard you may find yourself out of balance, and failing to achieve your most important goals. On the other hand, if you set your goals too low, you may miss great opportunities for personal success and fulfillment. Just like a well-run company, the most truly successful people have learned to set the right goals and to measure and monitor their progress daily. Efficiency Goals Time is a limited resource, so efficiency goals are critical in the workplace. Productivity is measured, in part, on the efficient use of your time. But efficiency goals are not only for work: evenings and weekends can easily slip away, leaving you wondering where all the time went. Effectiveness Goals On the other hand, some people get so "efficient" that they lose their effectiveness. Getting so busy you have no time to communicate leads to mistakes and the erosion of teamwork. Being super-efficient in dropping the kids off at day care, rushing to work, getting everything done in the evenings and on the weekends can still leave you feeling like you're on a treadmill. Effectiveness goals are about making sure you get the results you want. In his book The Seven Habits of Effective People, Stephen Covey says that efficiency is like climbing the ladder of success as fast as you can, but effectiveness is making sure you lean the ladder against the right wall before you climb. Efficiency and effectiveness goals must be balanced to achieve true productivity at work and to enjoy a meaningful and successful life overall. Family, Relationship and Teamwork Goals Work-life balance means achieving family goals, which includes healthy family relationships and solid financial security. It also means building good relationships at work and solid friendships outside of work. At the core of work-life balance is teamwork: building healthy relationships in all areas of life and working with others to achieve shared goals. Without realizing it, some high-achievers have actually sabotaged their relationships due to chronic neglect of some of these important goals. Health Goals Many people take their good health for granted. However, when severe health problems come your way, they are impossible to ignore. An effective work-life balance plan must include healthy diet and exercise goals, or poor health could foil all your success plans. Making the Right Choices Every Day Every day we make choices that affect our work-life balance. Unfortunately, many of these are unconscious choices, driven by habits. But conscious or unconscious, our choices determine the quality of our lives. Our work-life balance workshops are designed to bring awareness to every member of your team - so they can make the right, conscious choices every day. Tools for Setting and Achieving Goals A core component of our work-life balance workshops is setting and achieving goals. We provide participants powerful, practical tools for setting goals in all areas of life, for monitoring progress and for achieving those goals. Work and Life Are Balancing Acts Work, family and all aspects of life are a balancing act we participate in every day. It's easy to lose your footing. But with awareness and the right set of tools, we can all achieve optimal work-life balance. Show your team that you care about the important things. Invest in your team by scheduling a work-life balance workshop. Contact us for more information.

Work-Life Balance: Sustaining Team Productivity

Every manager wants a hard-working team. The best teams are engaged, enthusiastic, hard-working, creative and energetic. The term workaholic refers to hard-working individuals who have turned work into an obsession and have lost their sense of work-life balance: apart from work, they don't have a life. Although some corporate cultures revere workaholics for their image of a strong work ethic, sustained long-term productivity comes from teams where work-life balance is encouraged and practiced.

When Individuals and Teams Achieve and Maintain Work-Life Balance

Workaholics are out of balance - and so are the people who are disengaged and apathetic about their work. Workaholics tend to burn out over time, and the disengaged never seem to kindle a fire at all. The best teams are made up of people who have a passion for their work and a passion for life in general. They love to be at work, and they love being home with their families. They have hobbies and personal interests that fire them up, and they have great relationships inside and outside of work. They exercise, eat right, get enough rest, and wake up each day with a sense of purpose.

How can the members of your team achieve and maintain this kind of high-energy, sustainable work-life balance? Start with a work-life balance workshop. Contact us for a free telephone consultation and we will work with you to design the right program for your group. Show your team members that you care about more than just the work they produce; show them that you also care about their personal satisfaction and fulfillment.

Are the Members of Your Team Out of Balance?

When team members are happy and fulfilled at work and at home, their creative energy is always available for solving problems, managing projects, resolving conflicts and whatever else comes along. But when they are out of balance, the whole team suffers. Team members can become hypercritical, emotional and stressed-out; productivity drops as teamwork decreases; and in many cases, health problems and employee turnover begin to rise.

Our work-life balance workshops, seminars and coaching programs are designed to help teams and individuals to step back and reassess their goals, their habits and their lifestyles. We provide tools for making the necessary adjustments to achieve balance and optimal success at work and at home.

The Ecology of Work and Home Life

Every day brings opportunities to learn, grow and experience fulfillment. Those opportunities can come through the challenges of working with team members and achieving team goals; they come as well through family, personal relationships, outside interests and community service. When your life is in ecological balance, every experience leads to your growth and fulfillment.

The ecological balance in your life can be threatened by destabilizing behaviors such as workaholism, substance abuse, poor communication at home or at work, chronic stress, low emotional intelligence, dissonant social behaviors, self-defeating thoughts, and a host of other factors. We all have to manage the ecology of our lives, our families and the teams we participate in. The purpose of our work-life balance workshops is to teach the skills of ecology management to your team members.

Improving Team Ecology at Work

Team ecology is about how team members work together, how well they interact with other teams, how engaged they are in achieving goals, and how well the organization's culture supports its people. Behaviors that threaten the ecological balance of teams include:

• Poor communication
• Failure to resolve conflicts
• Gossiping, backbiting, finger-pointing and complaining
• Lack of accountability
• Constant emergencies, fire-fighting and quality problems
• Inconsistent, inefficient procedures
• Lack of consistency in dealing with problem behaviors
• Condoning mediocrity
• Favoritism, cronyism, cliques
• Hidden agendas, turf wars, empire-builders
• Poor management practices
  

When the ecology is in balance, employee turnover diminishes, morale rises and productivity increases: people enjoy coming to work each day. Our work-life balance workshops help individuals to improve their balance; but more importantly, they focus on solving the team-ecology problems that no single individual can solve alone. Managing team ecology is team effort, and we provide tools and processes for making dramatic improvements for everyone.

Improving Family, Health and Personal Ecology

If you schedule one of our work-life balance workshops, the amount of focus we place on family, health and personal ecology is up to you. We can touch on these issues lightly or give them significant focus, depending on your objectives for the training. Potential topics can include:

• Family communication and relationships
• Conflict management
• Family and personal-time management
• Stress management and emotional intelligence
• Financial planning and management
• Balanced diet, exercise, rest and relaxation
• Setting and achieving family, health and personal goals
• Re-engineering your lifestyle for ecological balance
• Developing and maintaining a positive attitude

When your team members step back and consider the life choices they are making unconsciously every day, many realize that they need to take steps to regain balance. We offer tools for evaluating, planning and monitoring personal and family ecology. The overall result is a team of people who have bonded together in achieving a balanced set of meaningful goals.

A Work-Life Balance Workshop for Your Team

When is the right time for a work-life balance workshop for your team?

• After they pull off a major project where everyone sacrificed and went above & beyond the call of duty to achieve team goals.
• When the pressures of work have taken their toll in the form of stress, and the stress is showing among members of the team.
• When team ecology is good, but you want to take it from good to great.
• When team ecology is not so good and you want to turn it around. (In these cases, the workshop can serve as a first milestone in the process of change. A workshop on how we need to improve attitudes can actually make attitudes worse; but a work-life balance workshop shows team members that you really care about their personal balance and well-being.)
• When you simply want to send the message, "We care about more than the work you produce - we care about you."

Our workshops are generally a full day or half-day in length, and can be conducted in your facility or in an offsite location. You can make the workshop an event in itself or make it part of a team retreat or strategic planning session. We conduct work-life balance workshops for teams at all levels, from front-line employees to top management teams. Everyone can get off-balance - especially in demanding work environments. Don't let your team members burn out. Contact us to schedule a work-life balance workshop today.

Work-Life Balance Coaching for Key Members of Your Teams

Your managers and team leaders carry the responsibility of building effective teams. But what if they are out of balance themselves? Your leaders should be examples for the rest of the team; if they are modeling the wrong behaviors, they may need coaching assistance in changing their behavior and achieving their own work-life balance. We offer onsite, telephone and Skype coaching programs for the key members of your teams to help them to achieve success in setting and achieving balanced goals. Please visit our Workplace Behavior Coaching website at www.WorkplaceBehaviorCoaching.com for more information.

The Best Teams Practice Work-Life Balance

The best team members are not only high-performers with excellent teamwork skills; they also have the staying power to go the course. These team players are the foundation for your organization's future growth. Some of the best potential performers reach the point of burnout because they haven't learned how to balance the demands of work, family, health and their personal lives. You provide on-the-job training for your employees in their job skills - why not offer a workshop in work-life balance? Contact us today for a free telephone consultation. After the call, we will send you a detailed outline and agenda for a workshop that meets the needs of your team.