7 ways to instill work-life balance at your startup

Image: Flickr, Steve Hardy


When I started AppLovin, creating a strong family culture that instilled a good work-life balance was a priority for me and my co-founders. I have three young daughters, so balance and family is of the utmost importance to me, and I want to ensure that my employees are able to create the same balance.

An employee who works 80 hours per week can be productive, but at what cost? That employee’s quality of work will suffer, and they will eventually burn out. Having a good work-life balance among your workforce will save you millions of dollars a year. It helps decrease mistakes, increase overall morale and reduce turnover.

Beyond looking at your revenue, you’ll find people are generally more creative when they aren’t treading water to keep up with an unrealistic set of expectations. Allowing for work-life balance means allowing for more innovation and advancement of your business.

When you work at a startup, it can be easy for "balance" to get lost in the shuffle. Below are a few ways to help make sure you give balance its due consideration.

  1. Start at the top: As the CEO, my duties require me to be available around the clock, but I know that my employees have a variety of schedules. I always take that into consideration. Just because I sometimes must work off-hours and weekends doesn’t mean I expect them to work the same hours or be available at all times. I make it a point to flag emails and respond at reasonable hours so that employees don’t feel pressured to work the same hours that I must.

  2. Be flexible with different lifestyles: It’s hard to have specific, black-and-white rules for work-life balance, because each employee has his or her own unique lifestyle. The engineer in her twenties probably has different work habits than the dad who leaves early in the afternoon to pick his kids up from school. For him, 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. might be a great time of the day to be productive. So rather than enforce specific rules, we have a general policy to be flexible and to respect our employees’ respective schedules.

  3. Image: Flickr, John Walker

  4. The small things make a big difference: We have meals brought in every day of the week and offer laundry service and gym memberships. Perks like this mean that our employees can actually have the ability to do what they want during their free time.

  5. Make work fun: We have fully stocked bars, foosball, ping pong and billiards. Because we’ve done a good job of instilling a strong family culture, our team often hangs out during off hours, and team members plan events such as watching the World Cup or going to Cirque du Soleil and invite the entire company. This culture helps work feel less like work.

  6. Give back together: In general, people aspire to give back and volunteer more, but when you work a busy schedule, charity can sometimes get lost in the shuffle. It’s important to let employees know that you support them wanting to give back, and give them time to do so. This holiday season, AppLovin team members will be volunteering for Project Open Hand, which provides home-delivered meals, groceries and nutrition counseling to seniors and the critically ill. Volunteering together naturally helps with boosting morale and team building, but it also reminds us there’s much more to this world than just our work. It refreshes our perspective and, more importantly, helps the community.

  7. Ditch "standard" office hours: No matter how many rules you put into place around work-life balance, every company will encounter times when you need all hands on deck, and your employees will work long hours. These stints are part of working at a startup, but it’s important to take your time off when you can. Because of that, we don’t have an actual in-office schedule. We believe in our employees’ ability to manage their workload, so employees are allowed to set their own schedule. That means if someone is working around the clock on a big project, and she needs the next day off, then she can take it — no questions asked.

  8. Image: Flickr, Cam Evans

  9. Reward hard work with play: We make sure to have several company-sponsored events a year that let employees unwind on our dime. For example, we are flying the company to Las Vegas this year for our holiday party. Some past events include San Francisco Giants games, Warriors games, family picnics and paintballing.

Every employee is different, so it’s nearly impossible to set strict rules when it comes to work-life balance. If you can follow a few of these tips, they will likely help keep your employees balanced, content and productive. If you make work-life balance a priority, you’ll have happier employees, a more smoothly run operation and a better business at the end of the year. It’s a win-win-win for all.

Adam Foroughi
