Promote work/life balance

Research by the Work from Home Employee Experience Index has shown that employees around the world prefer working from home to working in the office. That being said, 39% of teleworkers also say they work more hours, compared to 31% of employees in the office.

Flexibility to take care of both personal and professional responsibilities is key to work-life balance for Kane Carpenter, practice lead for employer branding and growth strategies at Daggerfinn, a growth strategies consultancy. For instance, one component of work-life balance for him is the opportunity to occasionally go to the grocery store at 3 p.m. when it’s less crowded, but then he works a little later in the evening to make up time. “To me, work-life balance, fundamentally, it means flexibility,” Carpenter said.

Matthew Ross, co-founder and COO of mattress review site The Slumber Yard, says he and his co-founder come from the world of investment banking, where long hours were the norm. “However, in the case of our company, we were afraid that these long working hours would exhaust our employees and generate resentment. When one of their employees resigned, probably due to burnout, the manager said: “We knew we had to change our working methods to prevent other employees from leaving the company. Following an IT audit, Matthew and his partner discovered that their employees were working outside office hours. So they implemented a new rule: no work emails between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m.