Having an excellent work-life balance is an issue that many employees face, and if they don’t know how to handle with the build-up of stress, it can eventually lead to mental health problems and that will affect your company’s productivity.
If you’re a business owner, a manager, or a senior worker with a remote team under your supervision, you need to pay attention to the signs that may indicate that your workers might be working in excess. If this is the case, you have to take the necessary actions to decrease the chances of them suffering anxiety and depression.
In this article, you’re going to learn everything you need to know about how to deal with overwork and stress within your remote team, so you can receive the best performance from your employees. Let’s observe:
- Recommendations for having a perfect work-life balance within remote teams
- What are the effects of working from home on remote workers?
- What are the common issues for remote workers?
- How can you reduce overwork and stress within your remote team?
- How can employers help their remote workers with overwork and stress?
- How can Connect Resources help you with your remote team?
1. Recommendations for having a perfect work-life balance within remote teams
If you’re looking for work-life balance tips for employees because you’re worried that your remote team might be facing challenges with this new method of working, you have to know how to solve this problem so you can increase your results.
Many employees tend to focus more on their work and they end up neglecting their personal life, and this can also happen with people working from home.
Although people might think that working remotely can be highly beneficial, if your workers don’t know how to handle it or if you as an employer are putting too much pressure on your team, you may not achieve your strategic goals as a business.
1.1 Why is it important for employers and remote workers?
Let’s observe why having a great work-life balance it’s highly important for employers and employees:
- Workers can be more productive
- It can create more flexibility to achieve goals
- Both employer and employees can understand how to manage their boundaries
- It ensure things run smoothly
With the Staff Outsourcing Service provided by Connect Resources, you can be sure that you’re going to have happy employees and, as an employer, you’re also going to be satisfied with their performance.
2. What are the effects of working from home on remote workers?
Working from home is becoming a challenge for many employees, and this causes them being unable to achieve an excellent work-life balance. For some, working remotely could mean an improvement, but for others it’s highly difficult.
If you’re having this challenging situation with your remote team, you need to know that there are many side effects that working from home causes in workers.
2.1 Bad habits
Since the remote workforce has many options to be implemented in the UAE you’re probably recruiting a remote team to carry out some business functions for your company, but if you don’t set clear rules, they may develop bad habits.
Working from home it’s tough because people find harder to enforce structure, and if the worker doesn’t have a good planning and organization, this could lead to unintentional bad habits.
Some of the bad habits that workers could develop are the following:
- Working on the couch or from bed, which could cause backache or any other health issue
- Not taking breaks, which could lead to mental exhaustion
- Not staying hydrated, which could affect overall health
- Not moving around, which could lead to physical issues
2.2 Continual long working hours
In-office workers know exactly when it’s time to leave home since they have working hours set and they need to go, but when it comes to remote workers, they may get stuck in their tasks and end up working for long hours until evening.
Remote workers don’t have the pressure to finish work at a particular time, so they continue working to finish a project or hit a deadline. It could lead to late-night working sessions and this harms many areas of people’s lives.
Knowing the work-life balance problems and solutions it’s helpful because it could make your team to be effective and proactive, and you won’t have to worry about their performance, so your business could continue operating without any issues.
2.3 Not getting enough rest and recovery
Since remote workers tend to work continuously and for long hours, they also don’t get enough rest and recovery. They go to bed late and wake up early, and this could lead to physical and mental issues because we all need the proper rest.
2.4 There’s no time for personal life
One of the main things you have to know about stress management within your remote team is that it causes many troubles for your workers because they tend to work hard and end up not having time for doing what they love and spending time with their family.
The overall sense of self gets eroded because they don’t have enough time for themselves. If your workers don’t have time to spend with their family, or to do what they love, it could lead to psychological, social, and physical issues.
3. What are the common issues for remote workers?
Remote workers face many issues related with work-life balance, and since remote working is a relatively new concept, employers don’t know how to handle with it.
However, as an employer, it’s important to know the issues that your employees may face, so you can understand how you can overcome these challenges.
3.1 No social interaction
Working from home could be lonely, and this is one of the greatest issues that remote workers face because they lack face-to-face interaction with their colleagues.
All the communication is done by internet or phone, and there aren’t casual conversations. How can you solve this issue? Let’s observe:
- Encourage casual conversations with your remote team
- Use channels of communication where you can see each other faces, instead of using email
- Have meetings where you can specify the tasks and discuss about work
If you don’t know how to handle with these issues, you can contact Connect Resources and get their HR Consultancy Service so you can know how to face the challenges that may arise with your remote team.
3.2 Working burnout
Since remote workers tend to work for longer hours because there’s nobody to monitor them, they may suffer from working burnout.
This usually happens because they want to get the job done, and they don’t care if they have to work all night to finish it. Take care of their logger hours and advise them not to work for long hours if it’s not required.
3.3 Stress
Stress is one of the most common issues that affect work-life balance in remote workers, and it’s usually difficult to recognize. Perhaps your remote team is suffering from stress but you don’t notice it.
Many remote workers are facing stress in their life mainly because of the lower salaries that are affecting employees in the UAE, and additionally because they tend to receive a huge workload from their employers.
4. How can you reduce overwork and stress within your remote team?
Once that you know that your employees’ work-life balance is compromised if they don’t know how to deal with a huge workload or with the challenges of working from home, it’s necessary to take actions to solve this problem.
4.1 Create a routine
If you don’t know how to handle uncommitted and disengaged employees and you see that they’re starting to face overwork and stress, then it’s time to start encouraging them to develop a work routine they can follow every day.
Ask them to follow a routine every day that allows them to feel like if they’re going to the office.
4.2 Define boundaries
Encourage your workers to define boundaries, by having a separate office space from their family. This will help them to separate work from life, and once they finish work, they can leave that place and spend time in another place of their house, so they can take their minds off their job.
4.3 Communication
When it comes to work-life balance tips for employees, one of the most important is to have a great communication, which means to discuss issues by talking and expressing exactly how they feel in relation with a task, a project or any responsibility given to them.
Another great advice is to discuss issues face to face, by Skype or FaceTime, so you can see your employees’ faces and detect if stress is affecting you.
4.4 Respect for holidays
There are times when your workers have to be readily available to work, but they need to know that they have to respect holidays and to use their spare time as they want. Don’t force them to work if it’s not necessary.
4.5 Social interaction
Once the Covid-19 crisis becomes manageable and you can expect to work return back to normal, you’re going to recover the social interaction within your team, but you don’t have to wait, because you can start from now.
Advice your workers to spend time with people offline, and encourage them to interact with people so they don’t feel lonely.
5. How can employers help their remote workers with overwork and stress?
As an employer, you have a huge responsibility to help your workers to have an excellent work-life balance. If there’s anything you can do to relieve your employees’ burden, you have to implement it so you can have a more productive team.
5.1 Set rules and be explicit
Your first action as an employer with your remote team is to set rules and be explicit about how you’re going to communicate with your workers.
Your company might have its own set of rules, and it’s your duty to express them effectively. What can you do to help your employees with remote working? Let’s observe:
- Set clear work hours: it will help to establish a specific timeframe where every worker is expected to respond, and also helps them to be comfortable to sign out and rest.
- Establish and communicate which tasks are urgent and how soon they have to respond
- Set out the channels of communication
- Don’t assume anything, always be explicit about what you expect from your remote team
5.2 Encourage good habits
As you already know, one of the work-life balance problems and solutions is that remote workers tend to develop bad habits. But, you have to solve this by encouraging them to develop good habits.
Let’s observe how you can do it:
- Ask your employees what they need to work
- Invest in creating safe relationships with your remote team
- Use positive reinforcement
- Talk openly with your team to follow good habits like taking breaks, staying hydrated and not working excessively.
5.3 Asses the workload of the team
Once you’re able to properly asses the workload of your workers, then you’re complying with the best advices for aligning your goals and objectives with your remote team and you’re on your way to success.
Don’t overload your remote team with work, you have to ask if they’re able to handle the assignments and projects, so you can receive a great performance from them.
6. How can Connect Resources help you with your remote team?
Now that you know how overwork and stress can affect your remote team, you have to understand how you can solve these issues with some strategies and with all the additional help you can get.
You can trust in Connect Resources, which is one of the top-leading agencies in the UAE that offers several services aimed to improve your relationship with your workforce. You can contact them to ask all of your inquiries and its dedicated team will be readily available to offer you a solution fit to your requirements.
Would you like to contact Connect Resources for assistance with your workforce? You can call at +971 433 166 88 or send an email to contact@connectresources.ae, and you’ll talk to one of their representatives that will gladly answer all of your questions.
