The advent of the hybrid workplace brings a host of new challenges for leaders and managers. Perhaps the most important one is this: How can you help employees maintain a work-life balance when it can be hard to even delineate between work and life?
We know that work-life balance is essential for employee well-being. It’s connected to higher performance and motivation, higher job satisfaction, less stress and burnout, better retention, and employee engagement. And even if the work landscape has changed, there’s a lot that employers can do to encourage it—starting with measuring what’s really going on.
How to measure your employees’ work-life balance
A core way to measure work-life balance is through brief, anonymous employee surveys that let your people share their concerns safely. As you consider what kind of questions you want to ask, ensure your survey covers different aspects of work-life balance:
Individual
Questions that address issues of personal satisfaction, priorities, overall well-being, and meaning, such as:
How would you rate your overall well-being?
On a scale of 1 to 5, how meaningful do you find your work?
How satisfied are you with your current work-life balance?
Organizational
Questions that help get a sense of how your people feel about workloads, time spent, and how your organization’s policies and practices affect work-life balance, including:
How often do you work overtime?
Do you feel supported by your manager?
What can we do to give you a better work-life balance?
Home
Questions covering family or home life, residual stress, sleep habits, time sacrifices, and work’s impact on personal life, such as:
How many hours do you sleep on an average work night?
Does that level of sleep feel enough for you?
How often do you sacrifice personal or family time for work?
On a scale of 1 to 5, how much stress do you bring home from work?
How to factor work-life balance into your well-being program
Once you have more insight into how your employees are feeling about their work-life balance, what steps can you take to improve it?
One key thing to consider is that simply reducing work time to create more personal time isn’t always going to be effective. Balance doesn’t mean a literal 50-50 split. It’s more about feeling fulfilled both at work and in your home life. People want to feel present and engaged with their work throughout the workday, and feel fully engaged when enjoying their personal time at home.
To that end, building or tweaking employee well-being programs around enhancing the quality of time spent at work and home can help effectively support work-life balance. That can mean offering a variety of options, such as flexible working, time off for volunteering, personal development budgets, and access to digital mental health and wellness platforms (like Calm Health) that offer always-on resources.
Working hours and remote working
In Q1 2025, 4 in 10 jobs allow some amount of remote work, according to research from Robert Half. So how can employers accommodate remote workers in their efforts to support work-life balance?
Encourage them to establish boundaries
Have your people experiment with dedicating specific hours strictly to work. That means letting colleagues know to expect a response to any late emails on the following day and normalizing that expectation. The key is to be heavy on communication, and to align the entire team on where there is space for flexibility and where there is a necessity for people to be available.
Notice out-of-hours work
If managers see a pattern of late-night Slack traffic or weekend emails, it’s time to ask some questions.
Help people create dedicated workspaces
Keeping work within work hours is only half the challenge. Encourage people to carve out a spot in their home (if it’s possible) where they’ll inhabit a work mindset. For employees who don’t have a dedicated office or room, a designated space can be a specific chair or desk. What’s important is creating a space that facilitates a shift into work mode. (For tips, check out our recent blog on creating effective workspaces.)
Double down on communication
Train line managers to reach out to team members for weekly or bi-weekly check-ins. For all of the benefits of remote work, it can lead to people struggling in isolation. Being proactive can help you get people the specific support they need before it snowballs into burnout. Give them our Manager’s Checklist for Opening Up Conversations About Mental Well-Being in the Workplace—which is a handy introductory guide to initiating mental wellness check-ins.
Celebrate balance instead of burnout
Make sure leaders publicly praise employees for taking recovery, balance, and self-care seriously. If they only shout out the late nights and above-and-beyond efforts, it can discourage people from prioritizing balance in their lives.
Encourage micro breaks throughout the workday
Studies have shown that taking a break of 10 minutes or less can reduce fatigue, improve vigor, and increase well-being. What’s more when doing computer-related work, taking a micro break of about 30 seconds every 40 minutes may help to lower elevated heart rates, suggesting reduced levels of stress. (See our blog post on normalizing micro breaks in the workplace.)
Keep an eye on vacation time
Vacations are an important part of work-life balance. Make sure managers and HR teams identify when people aren’t taking their annual leave and encourage them to unplug.
Don’t forget the parents and people with extra home demands
For parents and caregivers, working from home can disproportionately impact work-life balance in a hybrid work world. Our post on this subject can help: Protecting Your Well-Being as a Working Parent Today .
Here’s to balance!
Striking a balance between work and life isn’t easy for many employees. But it’s much harder to do if they don’t feel they have support from the organization. That’s where HR professionals and managers like you can make a real difference.
For more ways to help your employees foster a sense of well-being during the workday, check out 8 Practical Strategies for Work-From-Home Resilience. And if you’re interested in finding out how Calm Health can help your people become happier and mentally healthier, get in touch.
