5 key strategies to improve your work-life balance
As the pace of change accelerates it can be hard to find space to stop, think and reassess whether we’re really doing the best by ourselves and others. Taking the time to focus on your personal effectiveness can unlock a more fulfilling work-life balance for yourself and those you lead.
We spend years perfecting our professional skills, but many people pay much less attention to learning about the routines and techniques that help us better manage the pressures of work and life.
These so-called ‘soft skills’ are often challenging to acquire, particularly if you’re expecting them to somehow magically become part of your psyche.
There’s nothing mystical about learning these strategies to improve your leadership practices. It’s about making the time to deliberately develop your interpersonal effectiveness skills in a similar way to how you’ve honed your technical skills.
How can you improve your psychological well-being and resilience? What strategies and routines could give you more control over your daily life? How would structured personal development enhance the way you go about work?
As you find ways to be more in tune with managing your own time and resources and gather strategies for coping with unexpected challenges, you will grow to become a more effective leader at work and a more present partner and parent at home.
The case for improving your personal effectiveness
Burnout isn’t a medical condition but neither is it an empty whinge. In 2019, the World Health Organisation defined burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress leading to exhaustion, negativism, and reduced professional efficacy.
This destructive occupational phenomenon is soaring.
Future Forum, a consortium backed by Slack in partnership with Boston Consulting Group, surveyed more than 10,000 desk workers around the world – including Australia – between 2020 and 2023. Its final quarterly Future Forum Pulse survey found that burnout was on the rise globally. Australia topped the burnout charts with 50 per cent of workers reporting “I feel burned-out at work”.
Our jobs have become more demanding as we navigate accelerating technological change. In recent years we’ve also had to deal with the disruption and uncertainty of a pandemic and global unrest – all adding to the stress and often leading to reactive behaviour.
Sustainability is a hot topic in every organisation – but what are you doing to ensure your own ways of working are sustainable, too?
It spans everything from how you manage your own cognitive load as a leader to fostering a healthy workplace for your teams. It’s a legal requirement for Australian companies to provide a physically and mentally safe workplace but the fact is productivity and employee retention ticks upwards when people feel they are being well managed.
Being proudly public about your intention to improve your personal effectiveness through guided training will send ripples of positivity through your team.
First up: an honest self-audit
As you set out to intentionally develop your interpersonal management skills, you’ll need to benchmark where you’re at to identify the key areas where you can do better.
For most of us, this evaluation is confronting, especially when we work hard and continually deliver on the obvious business metrics. This bottom line is about unpacking your practices, beliefs, and behaviours to discover where you can improve.
Third-party 360-degree review platforms are popular and valid ways to obtain this analysis but they’re not for everyone, or every company, especially if you’re seeking more tailored feedback that is perhaps less data-centric.
Online courses can be a great alternative for developing your interpersonal management skills.
The University of Melbourne offers an online Personal Effectiveness course that learners can complete over four weeks or approximately 42 hours. It’s a flexible way for professionals to upskill and unlock new practical capabilities through a mixture of guided and self-directed learning, including an industry-recognised digital certificate.
Led by leadership and high-performance work practices expert Dr Belinda Allen, learners are introduced to frameworks and routines to help them build their interpersonal skills. You’ll find the most suitable approach for your personal style, learn where your strengths and weaknesses lie and discover ways to improve not just your leadership but the overall performance of your organisation.
Get time on your side
It’s a classic Catch-22: the busier you are, the easier it is to fall into a cycle of pounding the metaphorical mouse wheel just to ‘keep up’. And no one wants to be a mouse – even a metaphorical one!
It’s critical to take a breath to assess your relationship with time, and then make plans to learn new practices that will let you manage this precious and finite resource.
Push aside any self-talk that you don’t have time for growth opportunities. Understanding how to take control of your time will free you up to do more of what you love because you’re doing so much less of the busy-work tasks that used to fill your calendar and suck hours from your days.
One popular time-saving strategy is constraining how often you check your emails. Many of us habitually check our inbox on our computer or phone. You can get an assist from your email client or add-on apps that allow you to pause your inbox.
And definitely switch off all notifications! Watch the extra hours build up and use them for something more meaningful.
Time-management experts also cite positivity as an important technique to keep you on track. Try using the Pomodoro timer app to force you to focus for 25 minutes (no emails! no scrolling!), and then enjoy a five-minute break to refresh your body and mind.
It’s easy to see how discovering ways to protect your own time is life-changing for so many people. Understanding your own goals and values will give you the clarity to align how you spend your personal resources and get time back on your side.
Pick your priorities
As you begin that part of your personal development journey, consider some proven time-management tools.
- Reflect on your current approach to managing time and tasks
- Identify demands on your time
- Prioritise
- Break tasks down
- Maximise productivity and understand your peak concentration times
- Use planning tools
- Minimise procrastination
- Maintain motivation
- Let others know your timetable (or for our purposes work schedule!)
- Develop a regular study pattern
Become an adaptive leader
There’s no doubt that this is a challenging time to lead. But you can make it much easier to turn difficult situations into opportunities for growth if you embrace new frameworks and strategies.
Choosing to learn from experts in leadership, organisational behaviour, HR management, high-performance work practices and stress management puts a suite of strategies at your fingertips.
They’re across the latest frameworks and routines for leaders facing brand new challenges – a more common situation that calls for adaptive leadership. This style of leadership is flexible and can deal with rapid change and engage teams in collaborative organisations.
Famously forward-thinking software developers Atlassian have embraced adaptive leadership, which they regard as more important than ever precisely because leaders and teams are dealing with more complex challenges.
The exponential growth and continuing massive technological changes that have totally transformed how we work, and the way entire organisations operate require a different style of leadership to cope.
Command-and-control leaders belong to the past. Adaptive leaders have high EQ and openly and enthusiastically support their teams’ hopes and dreams, building a stronger foundation of trust in organisations.
On top of that, even when dealing with difficult situations or unfamiliar challenges, adaptive leaders make sure every member of the team has the opportunity to be heard, known as organisational justice.
When you’re an adaptive leader, you and your organisation are more resilient and open to embracing change. Tools such as scenario planning equip you to make decisions more decisively and more quickly because you’ve already scoped out possible paths and landed on the one that’s right.
Lighten your cognitive load
Cognitive psychologists have for decades researched how we process information effectively. The cognitive load theory explains an obvious truth that most of us are guilty of ignoring at times. It’s simply that our working memory has limited capacity and when it’s overloaded we don’t understand or retain much of anything (burnout, anyone?).
Removing the uncertainty from decision-making is a great leap forward in personal effectiveness and a boon for your own psychological wellbeing.
Recognising this and building your delegation, prioritisation, collaboration and self-reflection skills are all key to developing your personal effectiveness.
Learning and implementing proven strategies around cognitive load will ensure you can lead effectively and sustainably into the future.
We are bombarded with information – you can actively lighten your cognitive load by filtering the noise to focus on the signal. Streamline what you consume by deploying tools such as email filters (and make more use of the unsubscribe button!).
Other brain-saving tips include setting stronger boundaries, learning to say no, and carving out time for mindfulness and self-care.
A leader who routinely blocks out some time in their calendar to simply go for a walk or a swim and disconnect from email and calls is guaranteed to be more effective when they return to their desk. You can also share your newfound self-management practices with your team to further lighten your load and theirs!
A healthy work-life balance is vital for leaders
Perhaps this has inspired you to explore new ways you can improve your work-life balance. The University of Melbourne's micro-credentials in Creative thinking, effective communication, and design are ideal for busy professionals seeking future-focused leadership skills that emphasise both personal well-being and organisational success.