Work Life Balance. You might be familiar with the term… what is it? In layman’s terms, it simply means the proper prioritizing between your career and your lifestyle. The goal is to create a balanced life in which you find both your work, as well as your outside hobbies, fulfilling.
However, achieving a work life balance isn’t as easy as it may appear. In fact, Clockspot cites a recent poll by Gallup which finds that most adults report working 47 hours per week, nearly an additional full extra day of work, if you’re basing your work week on the standard 40-hour work week. With so many working more and more hours, the question becomes: how do you make it still work?
At Mustang, we believe a work life balance is important for a few reasons. As a marketing firm that focuses on strategic creative, we count on our creative team to fire off fresh ideas — oftentimes within tight deadlines — which means we need our team refreshed and inspired regularly. One of the best ways to keep a team motivated and inspired is to ensure that they are able to balance their work life with their own creative pursuits and hobbies. We achieve this through allowing flex time for our employees as needed, in between the highs and lows of client deliverables. The benefits are endless for both Mustang and our employees on this front.
Another way we like to incorporate balance into Mustang’s daily and weekly work routines is to “bring the fun.” Now, fun is a relative term depending on who you’re speaking to, but at Mustang, it’s important for us to create an environment that embraces communication and interaction, without making it feel like “work.” With that in mind, we enjoy regular team lunches on Tuesdays, we participate in community events together as a team and we work in special treats like team outings to the theater or “happy hour” after a busy week. And you should see our team walks around the office complex — a parade of purple!
This summer we’re looking forward to our Wild West Wednesdays, where, on the second Wednesday of the summer months — June, July and August — we’ll be hosting a laidback BBQ at the office after work, for our Mustang team and clients to enjoy some summer fun and hotdogs, as another way to unwind from the “go-go-go” mentality of work, and be reinvigorated for the next day’s tasks.
There’s no right or wrong way to achieving work life balance, as the success of that balance is determined more by the individual than the mass, but, we’ve found that when we take care to show our employees that we value their time both in and out of the work place, the creative fruits produced are our biggest reward. And, a happy staff isn’t that bad either!