Employers' Need for Flexibility & Employees' Work-Life Balance

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Recommended: The impact of globalization on international business

The environmental variation now and then shifted the roles of Human Resources vis-à-vis the working patterns in current business world. For example, the growth of female labour in workforce, the organizational changes to new flexible form, the enforcement and further amendment of Employment Act 2002 in flexible working, the arising awareness of work-life balance for working healthy, and so on (McOrmond, 2004; Honeyball, 2008; Redman and Wilkinson, 2009; Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, 2010). These caused employees and employers to cater to their needs and wants, changing their expectations in flexibility and work-life balance from time to time. Therefore, the intention of this essay will be to discover whether employers’ need for flexibility and employees’ need for work-life balance can be reconciled to a certain extent or vice versa. In order to fulfill this discussion, many references such as books, journals, reports and other relevant websites will be used and referred.

In accordance with the impacts of globalization, grimness of the business competition, adjustment in regulations and others, employers relied on labour allocation via flexibility to meet these challenges for achieving organizational goals and maximizing the performance. Guest (1987) as cited in Legge (2005, p.175) perceived flexibility in his Human Resource Management (HRM) model as “having three components: relating to organizational design, job design and, employee attitudes and motivations”. Nevertheless, to explore the reasons of employers’ need for flexibility in more accurate, the flexible firm model (Atkinson, 1984) and its flexibility will be referred to as the main focus in this essay. Yet, this approach may lead to uncertainty and p...

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...ssion of employers’ flexibility and employees’ WLB, they came into forms because of previous changes of factors. For both parties, there are many advantages of flexible working and it represents a huge opportunity for businesses. By getting up to speed with the legal perspective of flexible working and taking attention of some guidelines, employers can step confidently into heightened business competition via flexible working, enjoying increasing productivity and improving WLB for employees as a result. However, which can be challenging due to the impacts of working culture, the occupational change, the opt-out provision as the loophole to work longer hours, the employers’ practices in workplace to meet current demands, the changes of the nature of paid work and others. Indeed, the flexible working arrangements in reality might be not as ideal as its starting point.

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