Launching a company off the ground can be time-consuming, which sometimes doesn’t translate to a balanced routine between work and life. Fortunately, we both came from careers where we understood the hustle needed to succeed within the startup space. So rather than struggling to find a balance between work and life, we dove into an industry and started building a company that we’d be proud to integrate into our lives.
When you read books and articles on management and the workplace, there’s a lot of pressure on employees and executives to create a work environment where we equally separate our work from our personal lives. But, the truth is, in today’s world of connectivity, it’s nearly impossible to balance the two out. So at HENRY we choose to look at the relationship between work and life to be full circle and inevitably intertwined.
There’s a great article published by Harvard Business Review that states that “accomplishment in a career is achievable not at the expense of the rest of your life.” This truly resonates with us, and as founders and leaders, we make an active effort to ensure our whole team feels happy both at home and at work and that they’re never compromising one for the other.
While there’s no proven technique to perfecting work-life integration, we try to follow the below values to create a happy and productive team:
Embrace the inevitable intertwining of work and life
For the team at HENRY, that means bringing your dog into work, grabbing happy hour with your coworkers, celebrating birthdays and other life milestones, making your co-workers your friends, and of course having access to things like on-site dental care to make prioritizing your health a little more accessible.
Be flexible
At a startup, it’s impossible to operate a strict schedule, and keeping a rigid agenda often just adds an additional to-do item to what sometimes feels like a never-ending list of tasks. The reality is that meetings pop-up, fire drills happen, and life at work and at home can be both unexpected and thrilling. Flexibility is key to keeping things moving forward.
Do something that fuels your passions
For us, it was important that we created a company within an industry that we not only would be proud to be working in 5, 10 years down the line, but we’d also be proud to invest the time into day after day. When hiring, we look for that similar passion in candidates – individuals that are inspired by what HENRY is doing and energized to be a part of our growth.
Build a trusting and reliable team
Work with good people, have fun with them, learn from them, get inspired by them. At HENRY, we have three core values that we live and breathe:
- Be Kind: Be a good person. We have good investors, good employees, good vendors, good partners, good companies.
- Be exceptional at what you do: Produce quality work and take pride in what you do.
- Act like an owner: Wake up every morning and try to make the business and your role better than what it was yesterday.
Take time to recharge
Take advantage of moments to treat yourself, whether it’s a nice dinner or a quick trip. For us personally, we’ve found that short getaways or 3 day travel weekends are key to keeping our sanity through rapid growth and stressful times. But everyone’s different. We’re advocates of putting your wellbeing first and doing what you have to do to recharge and invigorate your mind.