4 Ways Technology Supports Wellness & Work-Life Balance
Let’s start with some statistics:
- 94% of service professionals spend over 50 hours working each week. (Harvard Business Review)1
- About 190 billion dollars per year is spent to address the psychological and physical effects of burnout. (Harvard Business Review)2
- 66% of workers feel they do not have work-life balance in their lives. (Smallbiz Trends) 3
- And only 23% of companies believe they are promoting work-life balance. (Deloitte) 4
Even though managing work-life balance is essential for keeping good health, both mental and physical, and increasing productivity, we’re still failing to consistently provide it.
Especially now, with workforces strained and many of us working from home, work-life balance is becoming even more fleeting. Both employers and employees need to take steps to prioritize making space a division between work and home life to prevent mental and physical burnout.
How Can Technology Improve Work-Life Balance?
Technology works both ways, it can create work distractions as well as provide solutions to avoid these distractions to make the most out of work hours. The right technology keeps your company connected and makes your organization agile.
Here are four proven ways to use technology for work-life balance, increase motivation, and improve productivity.
Cloud Technology
Cloud technology has transformed the way businesses work today. Employees can access anything and everything from any location. They simply need to visit a website, log in and gain access to files and use programs. This also facilitates collaboration and communication across teams regardless of time zone.
With integrated emails, document collaboration, instant messaging, video conferencing, and more, employees can coordinate schedules, share work projects, and work together more effectively.
Cloud technology gives the flexibility of working from home and empowers employees to be productive while managing their personal lives. It provides transparency and bridge communication with team members. Better collaborations improves overall productivity and help to get more work done, better and faster.
Here’s how iLink leveraged AI to design a virtual assistant, Birdie. It works with your favorite collaboration platforms and keeps everyone in the loop with a daily virtual standup.
Cutting Down on Media Consumption
It’s not surprising that consuming media whether it’s news online, social media, or television undermines time and makes you less productive.
In 2020, the average time spent on social media per day is 2 hours 24 minutes globally for users aged 16 to 64 on any device. The total of 144 minutes is a 1.4% increase from 142 minutes the previous year, and up 38% in the past 5 years. 5
Television accounted for the highest share of daily media consumption among the population in India in 2020. On average, five hours were spent on media usage that year – digital or otherwise on a daily basis in the country.6
In that regard, technology turns out to be the prime reason why work-life is facing an imbalance. The trick is to leverage technology to streamline your media usage. Browser plug-ins like StayFocusd allow you to limit time on certain websites, and Productivity Owl helps you schedule break times and block certain websites during other windows.
Healthcare Applications
Though mobile phones are accused of being the highest productivity killer, with advances in technology and mobile app development, employees can leverage incredible applications to keep balance in their work life. These applications track and manage the working time, avoid stress, and promote physical and mental health.
Workplace healthcare portals can help employees:
- To keep their wellness information in one place.
- Track and check on their daily health behaviors
- Deliver healthcare reports and messages
- Deliver awareness about healthcare
- Evaluate risks and cure
Using a workplace healthcare portal to its full abilities is a great strategy for dealing with stress.
Workflow Automation Software
Workflow automation software helps to gain work-life balance as an advanced platform providing flexible working tools to improve the way organizations work. It facilitates complex tasks, simplifies projects, automates activities, and makes them convenient to control.
Automated software can transfer information based on operation commands and an application programming interface (API). It gives the company the ability to create and optimize workflow, identify redundant tasks, streamline work processes, point out a potential area of improvement, and achieve new levels of efficiency. It can even integrate with other working software to keep you focused meaning you get your work done and can better transition to your life in less time.
Make the most of your time!
Technology has become a central part of our daily life defining how we work and live our lives beyond work. You can use technology to stay productive, centered, and connected for an effective work-life balance and not solely depend on it for every decision but it takes practice.
iLink offers technological solutions such as cloud technology and conversational AI to help your team ultimately increase focus and maximize work-life balance. To learn more about technology and productivity check out this blog – How businesses can leverage technology for productivity and growth.
Or simply, get in touch with us!
Endnotes
1. https://goremotely.net/blog/work-life-balance/
2. https://goremotely.net/blog/work-life-balance/
3. https://goremotely.net/blog/work-life-balance/
4. https://goremotely.net/blog/work-life-balance/
5. https://backlinko.com/social-media-users
6. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1153882/daily-media-consumption-by-type-india/
