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A short brief introduction about work life balance
Importance of work-life balance within the employment
Importance of work-life balance within the employment
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Recommended: A short brief introduction about work life balance
Work-life balance practices are thoughtful organizational changes in programs or organizational culture that are intended to reduce work-life conflict and permit employees to be more effective at work as well as in other roles. The evolution from viewing work-life balance practices only as a means of providing individual employees with care giving responsibilities to identifying their contribution to organizational performance and employee engagement is an important paradigm shift which is still very much ‘in process.’
In recent years, due to changes took place in demographic and workplace culture in a large portion, multi-faced demands between work and home responsibilities had increased the relevance of work life balance for employees , such as: a large numbers of women in the workforce (dual-career couples), transformation in family structures (a rise in the number of single parents), a rising acceptance of the longer hours culture, the rise of the 24 hours per seven days society, and technological advancements. In response to these changes and the conflict they generate between the multiple roles that individuals has to perform, organizations are gradually more pressurized to propose various kinds of practices, anticipated to facilitate employees' efforts to accomplish both their employment related and their personal commitments. The method of how work-life balance can be achieved and enhanced is an important issue in the field of human resource management and has received significant attention from employers, workers, government, various researchers, and the popular media.
The following questions were addressed in this article in order to encourage the improvement of implementing such practices: What does work-life practice...
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...alance initiatives that may assist employees to better balance their work and family responsibilities, gain improvements in well-being and provide organizational benefits. There are a large variety of family friendly policies which include but are not limited to the following: flexible working hours, job sharing, part-time work, compressed work weeks, parental leave, telecommuting, on-site child care facility. In addition, employers may provide a range of benefits related to employees’ health and well-being, including prolonged health insurance for the employee and dependents, personal days, and access to programs or services to encourage fitness and physical and mental health. Still, other practices might support children’s education, employees’ participation in volunteer work, or facilitate phased retirement. Some of the work-life practices are discussed in brief:
Many people love their jobs and the salary that comes with it, but is it worth the time of not seeing your family? Time management and balancing work life with your personal life, along with little to no stress should be improved today. The reading “Beat the Clock: Time Management Training Can Improve Productivity and Morale by Helping Employees Balance Work and Family” by Kathryn Tyler authored this article for people who struggle with time management, like their employees said in the text. This article is primarily about people and employees improving their skills in time management and productivity to balance their time and lives. Employers noticed that their employees are stressed on their workload so to fix this problem, they made a program
Previous generations have a strong belief of keeping work and home life separate; that work is for work and home is for play (Rampell, 2011, para 21). Today’s professionals do not seem to abide by similar beliefs, constantly crossing the borders of one into the other. While many recognize this as an issue that could result in employees being less productive, it has actually resulted in them accepting that their work may run late into the evening or even into the weekend. I agree with this completely in that I grew up being taught that business is business and personal is personal; you leave your home life at the door. But now times have changed, and my weekends are no longer dedicated to my home life, but for work, because I attend classes during the week. Also, in my line of work in the Allied Health industry, it is a requirement to work off hours. Long gone are the days of working nine to five, Monday through Friday; technology and the demand of wanting affairs done and done as soon as possible, has made it so the “work week” is now 24-7. “Jon Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard Institute of Politics, said, ‘Some experts also believe that today’s young people are better at quickly switching from one task to another, given their exposure to so many stimuli during their childhood and adolescence’” (Rampbell,
In response to the increasing need for employees to balance the demands of the workplace with the needs of families, Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act. Without a policy like FMLA in place, many employees often would have had to choose between “the job they need and the family they love” (Hayes). The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 is the first national law created to help Americans balance the demands of the workplace with the needs of the family. It successfully helps bridge the gap between family and work and secures the right for both men and women to get unpaid leave and assistance when dealing with family related circumstances.
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
To discuss work, one must first of all try to define work. Once one starts to think about this definition however, one finds that there are as many definitions of work as there are people. Experts such as sociologists have been trying to reach a definite answer, yet they can never agree between them. Although it is accepted that work is that time which is not leisure, one is then confounded with trying to find a definition for leisure. Stanley Parker reached a compromise by dividing our time in five sections, merging from pure work to pure leisure. However this difficulty in defining work should point out that these many different definitions lead to different attitudes, with the result that one can never generalise.
Imbalanced, our lives are imbalanced. We do not have time to climb the ladder of success if we want to be home to raise our children. We do not have time to raise our children if we want to climb the ladder of success. There are not enough hours in the day to do all the things that we need to do to have a fulfilled life. We do not have time to cook a healthy meal from scratch. We grab a box of Hamburger Helper, a can of peas, and a bag of rolls and we have dinner. Exercise consists of walking between the car and the door and maybe a little wrestling around with the kids before bed. At work productivity is counted by how many hours you spend doing your job instead of the results that our produced in that time. Mindsets like this hold us back. Flexibility for the employee is the future to balancing our lives.
At times jobs are keeping parents away from families. In the articles,” Double Daddy”, by Penny Parker,” Diary of a Mad Blender”, by Sue Shellenburger, and The Childs view of Working Parents” by Cora Daniels and Ellen Galinksy, the writers informs us that parents struggle to balance the responsibilities of work and families. While integrating time to an efficient expense of equality time spent with family, through goals, obligations and priorities. The main thing that all 3 of the authors revels is priorities/struggles, goals, and balancing responsibilities. Balancing responsibilities, goals, and a personal life is a struggle for many people, but the most important priorities in life, such as family, should not be neglected.
When the U.S. is compared to the conditions of other workers in other countries the numbers come as quite a shock. According to the magazine Psychology Today, “The United States—one of the richest countries in the world--ranks 28th among advanced nations in the category of work-life balance, 9th from the bottom” (Cummins 1). This stressful imbalance of home life with excessive work hours has left us in desperate need of more time and is becoming a strong identifier of American culture in the world. As Cummins explains, “We log long hours at work with the fear of losing our jobs through downsizing hanging over our heads. Then we fight rush hour traffic to get home in time to be super-parents, putting dinner on the table, helping our kids with their homework, and checking in with friends and family members we feel we have neglected because we are so overwhelmed” (Cummins 1). This well pa...
The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 is a law compelling all employers in the United States to provide unpaid but job-protected leaves to their employees. These leaves should focus on different qualified family or medical reasons. Some of these reasons are meaningful and can affect the wellbeing of the affected individuals. This fact explains why the passage of the FMLA of 1993 was something revolutionary towards supporting the needs of many Americans. Some of the “qualified issues that affect a large number of employees in the United States include military leave, family/personal illness, adoption, pregnancy, or foster care for children” (Chatterji & Markowitz, 2005, p. 18).
Work-based learning (WBL) as a method for learning is playing an increasing role in professional development and lifelong learning. There are lots of publications/articles available on Work-Based Learning, but the definitions and implementations vary from place to place. A Glass, K Higgins and A McGregor say that ‘Work based learning is any training that relates directly to the requirements of the jobs on offer in your organization’. This is one of the examples of WBL in the form of training. Work-based Learning is used as a terms in USA, for programs for school children to obtain experience from work (“Work-based Learning Guide 2002”). According to (Kathleen A. Paris and Sarah A. Mason) it gives a chance to young people to be prepared for the changeover from school to work and, to learn the realities of work and be prepared to make the right choice of work. In Europe (particularly in England, Scotland, Ireland) and in Australia available commendation is more focused on on-the-job preparation and on academic learning linked to work situations, Degree programs and negotiated learning programs.
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.
One factor likely to affect employee well-being, while not controllable by the organization, is triggers, or significant life events (McCoy, Newell, & Gardner, 2013). While there is no possible way for an organization to control the occurrence of these triggers, there are ways that an organization can be considerate of their employees’ lives outside of work to ensure that job satisfaction and well-being is not severely damaged. Through the practice of Family Supportive Supervisor Behaviors (FSSBs), organizations who allow supervisors to implement such behaviors can show understanding for their employees’ needs through individual flexible work schedules and family friendly policies (such as working from home) (Rofcanin, Las Heras, & Bakker, 2017). If an organization can show understanding that employees do have lives outside of work that will often influence their job performance and attitudes, then an employee’s well-being will not be severely impacted by these
Thompson, P & Mchugh, D 2002, Work organisations: A critical introduction, 3rd edn, MacMillan Palgrave, New York, viewed 4 April 2014, http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/lib/uow/docDetail.action?docID=10038997&p00=organisational+behaviour.
In The Work Place And Patterns Of Usage. International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 5.9 (2011): 61-80. Academic Search Complete. Web. The Web.
In Today’s world, the composition and how work is done has massively changed and is still continuing to change. Work is now more complex, more team base, depends greatly on technological and social skills and lastly more mobile and does not depend on geography. Companies are also opting for ways to help their employees perform their duties effectively so that huge profits are realized in the long term .The changes in the workplaces include Reduction in the structure of the hierarchy ,breakdown in the organization boundaries , improved and better management tactics and perspectives and lastly better workplace condition and health to the employees. (Frank Ackerman, Neva R. Goodwin, Laurie Dougherty, Kevin Gallagher, 2001)