Disruption of work-life balance is a direct path to burnout. The pandemic has shown how important this issue is, and now the problem has not disappeared. My thesis is that it is more profitable for businesses not to squeeze specialists to the last drop but to monitor their lives’ balance and invest time and effort in balance management. From the nicely configured business processes, you can get additional benefits.
The case described here concerns a company where Senior is the average level. The team was initially formed as a remote, long before this work format became mainstream. For more than six years, we have been working on complex Fintech and AdTech projects in banks and insurance companies on the Russian market, and at the same time, we are designing our product. That is why we focus on people with extensive experience in development.
Most of the company is mature people over 30 with families, years of experience, and hobbies outside work. From the point of view of work balance, these parameters are essential, and they largely determine how we address this topic.
Why is it beneficial to maintain the work-life balance of employees?
Any grown IT company has a lot of duties. I haven’t heard of underutilized development teams yet. On the contrary, the task queue has to be reduced, fitting it to the available time.
It seems more profitable for a company when an expensive specialist works not eight but 10–12 hours, completing more tasks. But in practice, it doesn’t work that way, especially if the projects are complex. There are no ways to force a person to solve more complex problems in a unit of time. Only routine can scale.
Moreover, overloaded employees burn out. They start having problems in their families, fatigue and mistakes appear. If a person works for 2–3 hours more every day for a couple of months, his productivity drops several times. In a few weeks, he loses everything he managed to gain before. If burnout is not noticed in time, the person leaves. There are a lot of examples on Habré when a squeezed-out specialist not only changes the company but leaves IT.
These are direct losses of balance misconduct:
- The cost of the employee hiring and onboarding. Attracting each employee in a highly competitive market is expensive, and a high-level specialist is even more expensive. The cost of hiring one person is now thousands of euros. Even if the employee was found relatively quickly, he does not immediately begin to benefit the project. Onboarding on tasks of our level takes three months or more due to the learning curve. During the onboarding time, an employee does not give the best performance. The rest of the team will have to seal the project holes.
- Reputational loss. You promised the client a new feature, but the development team was reduced. You did not have time to hire a replacement and failed your obligations. The client does not see the internal complexity. He considers the fact that you did not fulfill the promise.
- Negative PR. The man left dissatisfied because of constant work overload. Burnout will make him think that no one appreciated the effort. In this situation, the appearance of sharply negative reviews is not excluded. Moreover, he will definitely never recommend your company to his friends.
- Team discord. If an employee who managed to join the team leaves, bringing someone to replace him, you will have to spend efforts establishing internal communications.
It turns out that it is more profitable for businesses to build friendly relations with employees. This means that to maintain relationships over a long time, you need to monitor work and personal life balance.
How to notice that the balance has shifted
We have developed several signs of an imbalance in the lives of employees. Each point may not be related to balance, but it is always an indicator of some problem worth paying attention to. Perhaps the employee needs your help.
- Working during off-hours (outside of the discussed schedule). Many remote workers have the same problem — they get up in the morning and can start working right away. They do not need to go anywhere. They just turn on the computer. Then the employee can easily stay at his desk at 6:00 pm (or 7:00 pm, depending on when the schedule ends). Eat borscht and keep working. Overload must be monitored — there are many technical means for this. If overload happens often, it must be at least discussed.
- Performance degradation. The drop in performance is a call that a responsible person should respond to, depending on how the teamwork is built. Perhaps the reason for this is just fatigue from overload. In this case, it is impossible to demand “to comply with the standards.”
- Lack of holidays or shifts in the schedule at the end of the year. The service Rabota.ru shows that among specialists who receive 200+ thousand rubles, 36% are ready to give up vacations for the sake of a high salary, 23% are ready to work seven days a week, and 3% are not ready to go on vacation at all, because they don’t want to lose money. This must be very strictly monitored. By law, at least one part of the vacation must be at least 14 days. We noticed that those who are not going to go on vacation the rest of the days, in the general schedule, shift their plans to the end of the year (they say, then I will decide what to do with this vacation). At the end of the year, the vacation is simply carried over to the next year. So we pay attention to employees who plan to take a holiday in December. We call them and ask what they will do in December for so long (considering the January holidays). If we are not talking about a convinced skier who loves the Polar Night, we are trying to convince the employee that it’s essential to have a rest both in summer and winter.
- Refusal to participate in non-work activities. If people who were initially active start systematically skipping non-working activities, it is worth asking why. Perhaps they have already burned out and do not want to look at all this.
- Fatigue and emotional decline are noticeable in phone calls. At any meeting, pay attention to the emotional background. If a person arrives tired and does not want to raise his eyes to the camera, try to find out what is happening.
- Excessive irritability or anxiety, which is unusual for a person.
- Problems in the family.
Work-life balance under the microscope
Now let’s talk about the balance itself. We build our understanding on a well-known illustration — the wheel of balance. There are a lot of options for this picture. I will give one as an example:
A person should develop harmoniously in each direction.
Traditionally, the employer closes two sectors of this circle — finance and career issues:
- Finance — we pay wages according to the market. There is an indexing mechanism — within the one-to-one framework, we set development goals on projects and increase salaries when they are achieved.
- Career — we support those who are ready to develop further.
Generally, the employee manages the rest of the aspects himself. But without the employer’s support, it is more difficult for him to find this balance.
Basically, a business is not required to do this, but it can help by getting additional bonuses. It is enough just to think about what exactly the company can do from an organizational point of view or within the framework of HR programs.
Balance at the level of business processes
We have specific business processes in each aspect of the balance of work and personal life of employees. We did not implement them all at once. We gradually worked through many approaches, observing what is efficient and what should be ignored. In addition to balance keeping, the processes bring additional value to the business. Let’s talk about each aspect of balance in more detail.
Self-development
In this part of the wheel of balance, we have two business processes running:
- HR Sports Compensation Program. As a rule, companies can pay for a subscription to a gym or pool. We did it differently. Once a year, upon request, we transfer a certain amount so that the person himself chooses how to spend it as part of a sports lifestyle. For example, I bought a SUP board using this program, paying only 150 euros of my own money. I live near the sea, and now I can ride in the evenings after work in the summer. My colleagues buy running shoes, hiking gear, snowboards, and more. There was even a precedent when one of the employees purchased a sports computer game (with motion controllers). We do not ask for receipts — only photos of new clothes as a report. An additional advantage of this business process is a new topic for communication within the company. Company inner groups collect the posted photos of sports equipment. We even have examples of joint trips of employees from different cities. These actions dramatically simplify team building.
- DevRel. DevRel is a dedicated person who helps to express employees’ experience in technical articles on Habré. Many have faced the problem — when you ask a technical specialist to write an article. The first answer is: “I don’t know what to write.” Even if you pay him, the article will not appear. However, if you come to some internal team DevRel, you will be surprised by how valuable the employees’ thoughts are. Often, authors believe that all their ideas are obvious and it is not worth mentioning. Thus, it is easier to identify topics of interest from the outside. One person can make an exciting publication from a conversation or interview. The reaction of the audience inspires our employees. They like that their texts are discussed and reposted. A side benefit — our blog on Habré tells about the internal structure of the Maxilect company and its projects to those we hire. This increases the chances that a good specialist will come to us.
Health
We have two programs:
- Medical Reimbursement. Most companies have VHI for employees. We also have such an opportunity, but considering our specialists’ regions, we have seen that VHI is not in demand. It was used by no more than 20% of the team. People appreciate the opportunity to treat their teeth or conduct a general medical examination in some convenient clinic. In our case, it turned out that it is much more efficient to pay without the mediation of an insurance company. We did not dare to cancel VHI — we offer a choice of either compensation for direct costs or a policy. Compensation prefers 75%. At the same time, as with sports, everything is built on trust — we do not ask for financial statements.
- Buying a job. With a sedentary job, the convenience of a home office is directly related to back health. Many IT companies give out equipment. But have you seen what your valuable personnel are sitting on? Do you think it’s easy to work all day on the kitchen table with a stool? Our employees can request compensation for the cost of a chair and a table. The program has limitations — you cannot request a chair for 2 thousand euros.
Hobbies and entertainment
Unlike many companies, we hold regular one-to-one calls with employees to discuss personal goals. I recommend doing the same. We even have an unspoken tradition: employees talk about their hobbies in the internal chat. This encourages communication. As a bonus, we get hobby clubs (this works the same as with sports).
Spiritual development
In this area, we introduce a variety of practices. We have internal games, coffee calls, and sometimes online meetings in English. Sometimes we hire third-party speakers who hold remote events for us or talk about self-organization and time management. We have face-to-face meetings. With all this, we are trying to diversify corporate life so that it does not seem monotonous and everyone can find something to expand their horizons.
Family and friends
We do not feel we have the right to tell an employee what to do after the end of the working day. You can’t come to him and say — go for a walk with your child or spend time with your wife. We don’t stick our noses into his personal affairs. But we can influence that he has time, which he will manage himself. Therefore, we monitor the work schedule.
A couple of years ago, we had one unsuccessful case. A valuable specialist had a child. Due to his wife’s health problems, he had to help her a lot, and we noticed too late that he sends commits to the code at 3–4 in the morning. It took too long to react to this, and as a result, we no longer cooperate. Now we understand that if we noticed this earlier, we could somehow help — discuss hiring an assistant, somehow financially help so that he starts working according to a human schedule without detriment to his family and work. The loss of a valuable employee costs us much more than a nanny. We try to avoid such mistakes.
A side benefit for the company is building internal communication right away — respecting the schedule. Not relying on the fact that “everyone is always online.” We have built processes for notification of holidays and working hours and set up timeouts for responding to messages in different communication channels. It works and streamlines the interaction within a distributed team.
Instead of a conclusion, I would like to note that our business processes continue to evolve. Every month we improve something, the team independently decides what suits them and what does not. We are trying to find alternatives if we are not sure that most employees will like our initiatives. Reasonable moderation is crucial.
Author of the article: Sergey Marina, COO of Maxilect.
