Your Employees Need Work-Life Balance (for Everyone’s Sake)

Work-life balance is achieved when a worker gives equal priority to the demands of their career and those of their personal life. Following the pandemic, it has become an especially high priority for many employees. With work needing completion and only 24 hours in a day, granting this freedom can be difficult for businesses. Thankfully, Centelli’s Digital Workforce has the solution for you.

The Current State of Work-Life Balance

Even as businesses and employees re-evaluate their priorities, the state of work-life balance remains grim. It is tough to achieve in the modern work environment, where a 40-hour work week can dominate an employee’s daylight hours, and an even higher number of hours logged is becoming increasingly common. A 2021 ADP survey found that employees work an average of nearly nine hours of unpaid overtime each week.

This overworking doesn’t equal higher quality. Rather, it signals that employees are struggling to complete their assigned tasks. Emotional burnout is also a major problem, with just over half (52%) of workers feeling burnt out, according to a 2021 survey by Indeed. This burnout hurts employees and the businesses they work for, as it can lead to increased turnover and lowered productivity, as well as lower-quality work by bored and disinterested workers.

The Demand for Better Work-Life Balance

As workers got to reflect during their time at home, many concluded that overworking was simply not worth it. More and more workers are prioritizing their mental health, personal freedom, and quality time with loved ones. Additionally, a report by Hays found that nearly two-thirds (56%) of employees would accept a lower pay rate for a better work-life balance, while one-third (33%) rank work-life balance as their highest priority when job-searching. This sentiment makes sense, after all, what is money for if not to enhance one’s life?

Why Are Employees so Busy?

Surprisingly, the work your employees are so bogged down with may not even be what they were hired to do. Rather, study after study demonstrates that employees waste hours out of the day and weeks out of the year doing routine, menial tasks. In one survey of 2,000 U.S. and U.K. workers, more than half reported spending over 50% of their work day on repetitive tasks. This included data entry, filing documents, compiling reports, and managing invoices.

In another study, more than 90% of respondents claimed to spend 25% or less of their day on creative work, instead dedicating it to routine tasks such as scheduling and attending meetings. 43% said they don’t typically finish their daily to-do lists. All this is not for lack of hours put in, either: 59% of U.S. employees work overtime. Clearly, this status quo is neither efficient nor good for employee satisfaction.

RPA to the Rescue

The million-dollar question, then, is how to keep your business at same-or-greater productivity while also giving your employees the work-life balance they need?

One solution is adding Digital Workers to your workforce to take on everyday repetitive tasks. Digital Workers is Centelli’s name for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). We use this term because we train them in the same way you would train a person; they utilize keystrokes and mouse clicks like a human would.

Digital Workers save time, reduce human error, and increase efficiency, ultimately saving your business money. Additionally, they work at all hours of the day, so the breaks to recoup are saved for the employees who need it.

Digital Workers Help your Staff, not Replace Them

The thought of hiring Digital Workers may bring up the common fear of having one’s job “taken by a robot.” However, Digital Workers do not exist to replace your staff, nor are they intended to. Centelli has found, in fact, that introducing RPA to a company’s operation actually helps with staff retention, as employee satisfaction increases considerably. Digital Workers help grow your value chain and maintain competitiveness without hiring costs.

RPA frees employees from busywork, allowing focus on rewarding, complex tasks. Your employees don’t want to quit, but they do want to do more purposeful work. With Digital Workers, they can!

Learn more about how Centelli can help YOUR employees by booking your demo today.