Feeling good, at home and at work

The combination of home and office work (hybrid working) has many advantages, but also some disadvantages: extra stress, the boundary between private and work is blurred, loneliness... That presents us with the challenge of finding a new private work balance. The trajectory ‘Feeling good at home and at work’ can support you in this. You can participate individually or with your entire team or organization.

It is expected that more employees will work hybrid – a mixture of working in the office and from home. It is important to organize 'hybrid working' in a smart way and with maximum attention to the well-being of the employees. After all, research shows that working from home leads to physical and mental complaints. These complaints are because home workers often work longer than their colleagues in the office, have less social contact, and experience fewer non-work-related moments during their day so their days quickly slip into one gray matter and experience a less good work-life balance at the expense of private life. Over time, these complaints can lead to serious health outcomes, such as exhaustion and burnout, which in turn can lead to negative organizational consequences, such as increased absenteeism.

The negative effects of working from home can be buffered by supporting managers and colleagues, but more bottom-up well-being approaches can also benefit. One of these approaches is job crafting, in which employees adjust their job to make them a better match with their talents and needs. Research has shown that job crafting can promote employee well-being. Feeling good in your job is not only about the work itself. How you stand outside of your job in life also counts. Just as people can proactively adjust their jobs, they can also proactively adjust their activities outside of working hours to compensate for their unmet needs at work. We call this approach off-job crafting.

We want to promote the well-being of employees in hybrid working by giving them more control over adapting and aligning work and private life. We aim to increase the awareness of:

• their psychological needs, and of their demands and resources both at work and in their private lives;
• job and team crafting opportunities; and stimulating job and team crafting behavior among employees
• off-job crafting opportunities; and encouraging off-job crafting behavior among employees (including during breaks at work).

To achieve this, we develop a guidance process with a combination of activities, in particular:

1. online training/webinars on well-being, job, and team crafting & off-job crafting, and work-family balance;
2. guidance in the development of a job and off-job crafting plan using a step-by-step plan offered by us and
3. an email process with useful tips, exercises, etc. to support their job and off-job crafting plan.

This trajectory will be offered to 350 participants and evaluated using a pre-and-post measurement.

• A detailed script of the guidance process including step-by-step plans, worksheets, tips and tricks, references to literature, lessons learned, etc. This script will be freely available for consultation and download by all interested parties via the Odisee website.
• Organizing a study moment for prevention services, HR consultancy companies, large companies, and other interested parties to introduce them to the results of our project (detailed trajectory, scenario, results of the impact measurement, etc.) and to guide them in its use.
• Detailed job and off-job crafting trajectory will be included in the regular services of Acerta Consult.