A workspace is a complex place where people must deal with a lot of pressure and deadlines. In such a scenario, it is important to maintain certain practices that help you navigate through the responsibilities of your personal and professional life with balance. These practices will help you perform your duties promptly, maintain healthy relationships with colleagues and ensure ample time with family and yourself.
Here are nine simple ways you can create healthy boundaries at work.
- Maintaining Professionalism
Professionalism is a unique selling proposition in the job market. It is a quality that is always sort after by hiring teams. A professional always has a clear bifurcation of the personal and professional. They are punctual in their work, provide quality to the team and can make sensible unbiased decisions irrespective of their work relationships.
- Workload Priorities
In a workspace, it is important to have clarity of the assigned workload and the sense to take up duties that are attainable within the given deadline. Furthermore, for a healthy work experience, it is important to prioritize which work has to be completed before the other. This improves the efficiency and quality of the work and ensures it is submitted punctually.
- Clear Communication
Having clear and confident communication is vital in creating healthy boundaries in a workplace. Employees must ensure they pass on their views and voice on professional responsibilities or personal commitments in a clear and polite tone. This transparency in communication helps avoid misunderstandings and keeps the team updated about urgent matters.
- Maintaining Work schedule
Maintain a clear division of time and work for personal and professional life. This clarifies when it would be preferable to contact you to discuss work-related issues without invading your personal space. During work time, keep a schedule for work and meetings so that clients and staff will have clear ideas about your availability and accessibility.
- Respect Others
For a healthy workspace, respect for each other is essential. Just as you create personal boundaries, time slots and work divisions to maintain a work-life balance, you should also be respectful of others’ time and space. Only when you respect their boundaries will they be encouraged to follow the rule. This mutual respect and understanding help maintain a healthy workspace and life for everyone involved.
- Asking For Help
Asking for help, suggestion and advice from superiors and colleagues will help you better understand the workspace, work and work culture. Understanding how your colleagues work, manage time and create boundaries for a healthy balance provides insights to create your own healthy practices. In addition, these understandings help you navigate through work with better productivity and results.
- Reasonable Boundaries
Creating boundaries does not mean none are welcome in your inner circle. Instead, these practices help you maintain a balance between work and life. Hence these should be reasonable and well described to your colleagues so they understand the genuineness of keeping such boundaries. Honesty helps your colleagues better understand you and build a healthy professional life.
- Taking Time Off
In a competitive world where hard work is given importance, people must realize the importance of taking breaks. Taking a break from the usual environment and routine work will help to rejuvenate. It is okay to take time off work, spend time on yourself and regain your energy. It will aid in better performance in professional life and well-being in personal life.
- Learn to say NO
Learning to say a NO is important in any situation. Especially in a workspace where people pass on their responsibilities to others and ask to work overtime without extra pay or any other form of workspace abuse, it is necessary to gain the confidence to say a clear NO without any confusion or stress. It is a quality that should be imbibed so that you do not put yourself in any compromising situation.
The set of boundaries you establish in a workspace is to help you navigate your everyday responsibilities as a member of an organization and your role in the family. Creating these boundaries should be done in a healthy approach where the message is passed on in a polite tone. Learning the art of setting such boundaries without offending the opposite person is very crucial in a workspace.
Business operations often blur the line between personal and professional time. To avoid such situations and learn more tips to maintain a balanced life, subscribe to Indigenous SME Business Magazine. For the latest updates, visit our Twitter page at @IndigenousSme.
