4 Ways AI is Improving Work-Life Balance
This post discusses the difficulties of maintaining a healthy work-life balance in this age. It further discusses how the implementation of AI and automation can help improve the work-life balance of individuals.
It is a difficult job to be a business owner. It is not your typical five days a week, 9 am to 5 pm job. As a business owner, you wear not just one but many hats. And you need to wear them well.
Your job is not just restricted to a single domain. You are responsible for planning, communicating, executing, selling, managing workforces – all together. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that most entrepreneurs and business owners struggle to balance their work and life efficiently.
But achieving a successful work-life balance is not just applicable for business owners alone. Employees around the globe are trying to build this into their lives. Try designing a survey using a free online survey creator. Circulate it amongst your employees, and you can find out the truth.
So, what is it that is driving this revolution in the workspace?
What is Work-Life Balance?
Experts define work-life balance as, “the equilibrium between an individual’s priorities at work and their priorities in other aspects of life.” But in most cases, it is hard to define it in a way that makes it applicable to every individual in the same manner. That is because what suits you in terms of work-life balance, may not work for your family, friends, staff, etc.
Therefore, what can you do to make sense of a term that is the current buzzword across industries? Everyone knows its importance because it balances benefits for business owners or employees with arrangements to accomplish the functional implications for the business as a whole.
Why is Work-Life Balance Important?
Start by breaking down the term to understand the importance of work-life balance.
Achievement and Enjoyment: To survive, humans need to rely on both their feelings of achievement and enjoyment. This brings equilibrium in their lives. While achievements are fine in establishing a sense of accomplishment, minus enjoyment, it means little. This encompasses achieving the balance across work, family, friends and yourself.
Prioritizing and Organizing Life: Prior to working on your work-life balance, it is essential to sit down and prioritize what holds real importance for you and then work your way backward from there.
Considering business perspectives, things that matter are:
- Growing business revenue
- Attaining sustainable income
- Increasing employee retention
If you are taking the social perspective into consideration:
- Be a good parent
- Be a supportive partner
- Be a reliable friend
There is, of course, more to life than this. Therefore, it is understandable that you need to create and organize an endless list of priorities in more than one aspect of your work-life.
Also Read: How AI Resume-Builders Can Remove Potential Recruitment Bias
Can Automation Help?
There have been multifarious promises that AI can play a significant role in improving work-life balance. With access to machine learning, neural network intelligence and low crevasses of deep learning can help in automating processes that lead to more efficient work practices.
While there is still contention amongst many on the viability and potential of AI, this is how it can improve work-life balance:
Killing All the Grunt Work: Minus the element of repeat work is something that is AI is really great at. By alleviating the ‘grunt work,’ it frees up a lot of time to pursue something that you really love. This leaves workaholics with an opportunity to address their need for work-life balance and begin managing their existence more holistically.
Organizational Management: In the modern business landscape, bringing artificial intelligence online assists in principal process projections, fundamental architectural conformation tasks, along with data management. It is time for enterprises to concentrate only on the smart stuff.
Enhancing Productivity: Businesses are generating massive amounts of data, every day. It is becoming increasingly imperative for businesses to focus on processing this data effectively. The idea is to make it simpler for employees to access the right information at the right time.
With new-age technology in place, the possibilities of productivity enhanced through artificial intelligence are endless. Adaptive experiences basis location and context, intelligent assistance to highly personalized service, AI integration undoubtedly improves productivity levels which in turn benefits the overall business.
Increase Workplace Productivity Quotient: With the assistance of AI enabled planning, preparation, and provisioning, businesses are able to recognize verticals in the organization where employee responsibilities can be augmented by making use of digital virtual assistants. Therefore, complicated tasks such as delegation, scheduling can be handed over to machine brains without any hesitation.
Consider Hyper-Personalization: This is a concept in AI that will make its mark in 2019 via a range of applications across health, finances, shopping and everything else in between. By taking behavioral and real-time data, hyper-personalization with AI will generate more relevant content, product, and service information to the individual user. A fantastic example of hyper-personalization is Amazon, where it uses data points like customer names, search queries, approximate search time, history of past purchases, brand loyalty, average spend amount, etc. to identify customer patterns. Moving to the level of predictive hyper-personalization, Starbucks, analyzed a number of factors that helped dole out offers to customers based on their unique inclinations and consumption behaviors in the past.
Is AI Improving Your Work-Life Balance?
It can be very stressful to cramp in too many tasks in a seven-hour workday. This is detrimental to personal relationships, health, and overall happiness. Similarly, monotonous work days too can leave you feeling unfulfilled and disengaged.
This leaves a lot of scope for automation to help in creating a work-life balance and give your priorities the attention that they deserve.
Also Read: How L&D Initiatives Encourage Creativity in the Workplace
