Work Life Balance – Make A Stand To Keep You Healthy
If you’re running a small business and you have employees, it is probably fair to say that there is a good chance that you don’t offer health insurance benefits. Why should I, you ask yourself, when I already pay automatically for ACC and other non-related insurance costs. Typically the number of small businesses offering employees group health insurance in New Zealand is extremely low.
In working extra hard to keep their businesses afloat and ahead of the competition in these uncertain times, may eventually result in owners putting themselves and their employees in increased risk of ill health and burnout. Stress in the form ‘office burnout’ can manifest itself as a state of physical, emotional or mental exhaustion weighing on the value of your work and that of your business.
Occasionally the challenges of balancing home work life can start to have an impact on your overall physical health and mental wellbeing. Finding the right balance between competing demands of home and work and supporting your team to do the same, can often be tricky to achieve. This presents a problem, not only for you and your team, but ultimately it gets harder to retain or attract new customers to your products or services.
Work-life balance means different things to different people at different stages of their lives, this is why the health and wellbeing of employees should be a primary concern for corporations as the economic and social impact can be dramatic to employees’ families and communities.
For this reason, many organizations are partnering with health-care organisations, becoming valuable partners in employee mental and physical health initiatives. Healthcare leaders recognize that the challenges facing many businesses can be addressed with connected digital technologies. Using monitoring tools that share healthcare data with employees and their families, medical providers and partners can help identify early stage mental and physical health issues before it becomes prevalent and harder to manage.
With the current wave of digital technology, wearable tech can seamlessly transmit information allowing employees to receive viable information to highlight nutritional deficiency in their diets, lack of sufficient exercise through measured physical activity, to managing stress and depression. Employees (job dependent) suffering from overwork fatigue can be identified for example, through wearing socks embedded with sensors that monitor walking pace and gait, headgear or eye-wear to measure alertness. Having a 24/7 online GP service, can also make it easy for employees to fit an appointment around home and work commitments.
Because these wellness applications generate huge volumes of data, healthcare organizations will need advanced technologies, such as signal processing, event alerts, anomaly detection, and process modelling, to pinpoint data that requires further analysis. Once the tools identify circumstances necessitating closer inspection, healthcare organisation’s in-house professionals can reach out to the employee to learn more and if necessary, initiate an employer sanctioned health program.
Currently companies there are some established and high-tech startup companies with expertise in hospital-bed monitoring devices, offering wellness sensors that can be slipped under the patient’s mattress to detect and monitor vital signs. Using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities, the products measures the heart rate, respiration rate and sleep and movement patterns of patients in their homes. It sends the collected data through the cloud to the user’s mobile app, where it can be shared for health-care, research, and personal purposes. It is only a matter of time before this technology is enhanced and in embedded into our daily work life.
That said, it’s all well and good to have this technology, but at the end of the day the onus falls to both the employer and employee to lay down some rules to running their daily life and being consistent in encouraging the same behaviours within their teams to start achieving more of a work-life balance and making improvements all-round.
The more you, your employer and your team know about your health, the better decisions you can make to live the life you want.
Be happy and live long!
