Significance of Work Life Balance
Work-life balance is about creating and maintaining supportive and healthy work environments, which will enable to have balance between work and personal responsibilities and thus strengthen employee loyalty and productivity. A recent survey conducted among 707 respondents selected on basis of 3S sampling by outlook business and MDRA to understand how corporate in India are balancing their work and life, shows some interesting findings which highlights importance of Work Life Balance among employees and specifically within females and Gen X employees.
• A whopping 87% consider Work Life Balance as a precious commodity.
• Employees need to balance their work and life at every stage of their life and thus companies
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• Majority of employees belonging to Gen Y admit that in order to manage familial responsibilities they would consider switching to other companies with flexi-work options. 31 20 11 11 Figure 8
In lie of above findings few work life balance strategies are being suggested in order to retain key talent in organization and gain utmost performance by ensuring wellbeing of its employees.
Work life Balance strategies to achieve high Retention rate
Attaining work-life balance is a holistic approach that takes into consideration management of multiple aspects of work as well one’s personal life. While it is the responsibility of both employees and employers to manage life effectively at the workplace and beyond, a 360-degree outlook, boosted with the right mindset and willingness to attain the balance is critical for this. Some of the strategies are suggested here in order to maintain physical and mental well being of employees and attain higher retention rate in
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So instead of creating a culture where everyone eats lunch at their desks, encourage your employees to take long lunches so they can recharge their batteries.
• Invest in tools and technologies To stay on top of their ever-increasing workloads, many employees are forced to take work home with them which adversely affect work-life balance. By investing in the right tools and technologies, however, can make their jobs more manageable. By investing in the right tools, employees will likely be able to reclaim a good chunk of their days.
• Energy management
Work-life balance is largely driven by efficiency, which is not just time management, but also energy management. For better energy management, companies could conduct workshops for leaders and employees. Managing energy is a powerful additional way of streamlining our work life better. Energy Workshops are a unique concept with modules that aim to create a sustainable high-performance culture by extending to employees, ideas and tips to manage their energy more skillfully, so that it leads to better time and stress management. The idea here is that for individuals to recharge themselves, they have to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviours and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they find themselves
It appears that Generation Y is executing the wishes that other generations of workers subdue, and are subsequently portrayed as a vocal group by default. As a result of millennials’ demands, various companies are now beginning to conform to the ideas this generation presents. As such, new policies are being implemented,
The job that I currently work at offers work-life balance like Best Buy; such as my boss letting me work only Friday and Saturday to help balance out with my fifteen-credit school schedule, as well letting me have Sunday off for church and being with my family. We are also goal driven, as being able to sell a lot of product during sales and increasing in the years has pleased our employer, and she rewards us for our efforts with scratch offs of a store product for free. Having a surplus of employees like Best Buy would not work in our situation because that would lead our employers to pay the surplus in employees and could result in an increase in product price and/or decrease in other workers’ salaries to compensate, and we have enough employees in our department to fill in the days when someone is gone. I would not make any changes because I believe our current work environment is
This source explains the relationship between working overtime and the work-family conflict. With this source, they “investigated whether work-family conflict is prospectively related to adjustments in work schedules… in this relation”. (Jansen) They also wanted to prevent work- family conflict. They also know that balancing work and family is a challenge in today’s society for individuals. Consequences associated with work and family “job burnouts, psychological distress, depression, life dissatisfaction, elevated need for recovery from work, prolonged fatigue, and increased sickness absence”. (Jansen) The companies are starting to notices that employees are looking for other jobs that support them balance their work and family. Jansen used questionnaires to figure out the work-family conflict investigation. Each questionnaire was use with different types of working people. For example, the part-time and full-time workers. The results for the work-family conflict, “employees might adjust their working time arrangement to better reconcile work and family life…” (Jansen) They are considering their next research on the adjustments to “result in an improved work-family balance, improved health outcomes, and ultimately whether these adjustments prevent workers from leaving the labor force early.” (Jansen)
By 2025, about 75% of the American workforce will be made up of Generation Y workers, said Emily Matchar, author of “Why Your Office Needs More Bratty Millennials.” Generation Y, also known as millennials, are those who were born within the years 1982 and 1999. Time management has become a persistent issue for people in the United States because of the lack of flexibility in the workforce. Work is taking over people’s lives. The current generation of workers tend not to demand because of the fear of unemployment; jobs are scarce these days. Generation Y workers have shown that they will not accept today’s hierarchical workplace, on the contrary, they will begin to change the workplace to their likings.
Many different types of workers are constantly connected to work. They work even when they are away from their jobs, often at nights, on weekends and on vacations,
A typical day for most people in today's world starts out with an early commute to work. People working in the city know what a hassle it is to deal with the many thousands of other trying to make their way to work. Dealing with long commutes and traffic congestion is a commonplace in today's fast-paced society. What if you had a chance to do most of your work at home? Would it be beneficial to you and your company? That is a common question one, which more and more companies are finding out is the future of business.
It is a well-established reality that organisations in the world today can no longer survive without focusing on their employees. If they have to be at the competitive edge, they have to invest in human resources, and placing their employees on top priority. This notion has led to the strategies that, most organisations are pursuing through employee management. To achieve the optimum performance of employees, organisations must motivate their employees, and engage them in activities that will benefit and help employees in achieving their predetermined goals and objectives. In order to achieve this, it is imperative for managers to set in motion work conditions that will help employees to achieve satisfaction of their job, low turnover and absenteeism rate and promote the environment that promotes the organizational commitments and organizational citizenship behavior.
Work-Life Balance: Personal and Organizational Perspectives on Balance and Flexibility, HRM 6920 – Fall 2014
The workplace today goes beyond just the walls and ceilings that surround an office environment or office building. According to the International Telework Association and Council, 44.4 million Americans worked from home at least part of the time in 2004, up 7.5% from just on year earlier (Earthweb, 2005). Though it may be very convenient to work from home, the choice can bring its own set of problems. There are financial reasons, efficiencies, and even managing time are just a few to name that bring about many challenges and issues that any remote employee would face in that type of work environment.
According to the interviews, participants with greater personal responsibilities viewed flexible work arrangements as a necessity, not a bonus (Galea et al., 2014). The authors explain that as greater awareness of FWA practices is brought to employers and employees, both parties begin to reap the benefits. Employers have seen improved productivity among employees and employees recognize their improved well-being as a result of FWA utilization (Galea et al., 2014). By their definition, “Work-life balance refers to how individuals manage and negotiate the domains between work and personal life, including issues of holding multiple roles and other work-life conflicting matters” (as cited in Galea et al., 2014, p. 1091). The authors reference the importance of minimizing role conflict: Picture a parent with the flexibility to attend a child’s daytime school function and answering client emails in the evening hours, this should seem like a natural, effortless transition from professional to personal and back to professional; in fact, the author Meagan Johnson (discussed earlier in this review) would suggest that no transition is necessary, that modern workers do not want to distinguish between their personal and professional lives so
Human resources will need to place emphasis on employee wellness my initiating programs that “include work-life balance processes, stress management, and therapy programs, and facilitating an open dialogue about mental health and illness to remove much of the stigma that plagues the conversation and ailments (Guppta, 2016).” By utilizing flexible work schedule options, demanding jobs with high-stress levels are possible because employees’ free time does not have to be sacrificed.
With all the positive feedback from the selected companies, there is only one question that comes to most business owner’s minds, “what is the negative side to all of this?” Jason Laurtisen (2012) suggests that frequently, “work is seen as a burden” and that the enjoyment and pleasure really comes from time away from the office. If this is true, how can one ever come to a compromise with work life balance? If employees only view jobs as a stress factor or a money opportunity and they do not really enjoy what they are doing, then that is where the real problem kicks in. The problem is then steered to the fact that work life balance is not the solution, but finding the perfect job match for the perfect person is.
There have been various questions that have been asked concerning how people can balance their family lives and work life. Some researchers decided to do a research which showed that many people are not able to balance their family and work life. This is because they do not know how to do it (Fine-Davis, 2005). There is always too much pressure on one side of their life which leads to some of them ignoring one part of it. The other part gets too much attention. This then leads to an imbalance in the family life and work life. This has been the main problem that many employees are facing. They have to do it because when one side is neglected, it becomes relay difficult to make up f...
But in the use of the term “technology” today, there is far more associated meaning than automobiles or washing machines. It has ushered in an entirely new way of working, and in increasing numbers of organizations, increased options of just where work associated with a particular job will be done. More employees than ever have the option of working at home yet still being employed either full...
...s in the corporate world by setting new standards to promote and better satisfy their employees. We chose four leading companies in four different industries. The above analysis definitely reveals that perhaps one of the reasons why these companies are the leaders in their industry is because they are well aware of the importance of the work force. They mention in their mission statements as well that yes in deed customers are important but in order to make the customer happy they first need to motivate and satisfy the employee as well. According to Citibank, the general belief is that a happy worker is a motivated and loyal one. So keeping employees' spirits high is a sure-fire way of maintaining a productive workforce. A productive work force would ultimately lead to a healthy organization which would not only promote the society its working for but also itself.