Question

Submit a 2-3 page paper reviewing your company’s work/life balance policies and practices (pros and cons). Provide recommendations for improvement; analyze costs and benefits associated with those recommendations; and include guidance on how you would implement the recommendations. Students have the option to research and write about a different company of their choosing if desired.

Answer 1

Helping employees to balance their work and family lives is a business imperative. Work–life balance policies (like flexitime) aim to support employees to do so. However, implementing these policies is problematic.Research purpose.

:Organisations must develop and implement work–life balance policies. This requires human resource practitioners to investigate and understand experiences and perceptions about the challenges and benefits of flexitime.Research design, approach and method: The researcher used a qualitative research design with an exploratory approach. She drew a nonprobability purposive and voluntary sample (n = 15) from the financial sector. She used semi-structured in-depth interviews to collect the data and conducted content analyses to analyse and interpret them.Main findings: The researcher extracted four main themes (individual and general challenges, the aspects organisations need to implement flexitime effectively and the benefits that would follow its implementation) from the data. Its benefits vary from work–life balance to employee loyalty and commitment. Some challenges are maintaining productivity, a shortage of critical resources and understanding flexitime.Practical/managerial implications: The research identified requirements that human resource practitioners should attend to in order to ensure that organisations use flexitime more effectively.Contribution/value-add: The researcher obtained unique findings about the minimum requirements for implementing flexitime effectively. They could assist organisations to address the challenges that employees face.

Work-life balance as “equally and comfortably balancing an employee's chief priorities of their employment position and their private lifestyle”. In other words, develop a system where an individual is able to carry out their work responsibilities without sacrificing their personal goals.

The common elements of work-life balance

There are various types of work-life balance initiatives an employer can make. It can range from something as simple as allowing telecommutes or work-from-home options to offering training programs, child care services, time-off for following hobbies and more. To keep things simple, we will concentrate on the more popular aspects of work life balance offered by employers today. Some of the common elements in companies encouraging work-life balance are: Allowing schedule flexibility Allowing employees to work from home Encouraging short breaks throughout the day Allowing unpaid time off for life events Granting leaves easily When the focus is on business development, employers inevitably lose focus on where to draw the line regarding these practices.

Development of a complacent attitude

t is important to build a rapport with your employees by understanding their personal issues and granting them a leeway to work around them. However, it’s equally important for employers to know where to draw a line. When there’s freedom to work at individual schedules suiting employee needs, there’s room for them to take advantage, by not being productive, for example. Similarly, the many short breaks employees are allowed to take may turn into long ones, and the easy grants to take unplanned leaves will result in their absence from the desk too often. If you’re not building a system of measurement to monitor some of these benefits, it may result in the employees developing a complacent attitude towards their job. Consequently, this leads to lower productivity, lack of ownership and accountability. If you want the welfare of your business, then you need to remind your employees about managing their responsibility efficiently.

Lack of communication and innovation

One of the most common challenges faced by employers who have a team working remotely is communication. While the reasons are genuine most of the time, the employee can ‘make a habit’ of such issues. For instance, an employee working from home might be situated in a ‘bad phone network’ zone – thus, reaching out to them becomes challenging. This results in confusion and possible delays in completing the assignments. Similarly, there may be poor internet connection or electricity problems – common problems of today which makes the remote working option very inefficient.

Distractions and missed collaborations

Often, employees promise that they will manage work from home and stick to deadlines but are unable to do so due to genuine reasons. Be it due to having a pet or having constant distractions with a large family in the house, such employees are bound to be interruptions that won’t let them concentrate on their work. An employee who enjoys scheduled flexibility can work perfectly well in his or her comfort zone if the project is being handled individually. But in the case of a group project, where one team member’s task depends on another’s, there’s bound to be a setback. The one who can choose his or her timings can’t keep up with what the rest of the team is doing.

Policies behind work-life balance:

In many organizations there are a range of policy choices that have been put in place to accommodate employees in the field of work life issues. Polices implemented in organisations are intended to assist employees, especially caregivers and females, to manage work and personal conflicts. Supporters of policies argue that the policies in HR practices help people achieve balance of work and life issues. Sparrow & Cooper (2003 pp.220) applied the situational theory framework quoting “work-life balance policies are introduces where the organizations sees a direct link between them and a solution to problems of absenteeism, and staff turnover”. He indicated that employers are implementing policies as part of a strategy in attempt to illustrate caring responsibilities for coping parents.

However, according to Hudson (2005 pp.14), “the mere availability of extensive and generous work/life policies does not necessary result in widespread utilisation by employees or subsequently improvements in work/life balance reductions in work/life conflicts.” He explains that the complex nature of work-life balance policies is not being utilized because employees are afraid to use the programs as a result of fear of negative consequences. Coussey (2000) mirrored Hudson (2005) statement by implying that employers may believe that it is insignificant benefits of having these polices and that employees may be unable to afford to make use of these policies because of concerns that it may affect their career progression.

However, according to Torun (2007 pp.5) “the potential benefits of work-life programmes, can lead to real qualitative and quantitative benefits for the employer in terms of productivity gains, lower turnover rate, a stronger team spirit and loyalty to employer.” His analysis of work life balance is associated with employees’ performance which provides evidences that a well structure programme can assist with time management benefits for both the employees and the employers in terms to increase productivity and at the same time personal life satisfaction. Conversely, to compliment to Torun (2007) analysis, Crouter & Booth (2009) implied that organisation that has a supportive work-family culture is associated to positive outcomes that organisations benefit from such as increase commitment, higher job satisfaction, lower absenteeism, decreased work family conflict, decreased psychological distress, fewer somatic complaints and decreased role strain.

Best Practices promoting Work-Life Balance:

The complexity of a best practice approach would be appealed by employees once offered by organisations. By exhibiting this context it would assist in develop strategic responses and positive concepts for employees and employers. Burke & Cooper (2008 pp.229) “best practices in the workplace are generally understood as a set of practices or actions which results in optimum outcomes, ideally benefiting both employees and the employing organisation.” Burke & Cooper (2008) further explains that the imperative of work practices increases the morale of meeting the dual agenda of employees’ well-being and workplace effectiveness.

To mirrored Burke & Cooper (2008), according to Taylor (2002) he indicated that organizational practices often assists companies to achieve competitive advantage in the marketplace. They argued that these practices usually enhance business performance in organizations that implement practices. However, another theorist Cooper (2005) disagreed with the statement above, she indicated that what is consider good practice in one organizations may not be appropriate in one another. According to Lewis & Cooper (2005 pp.5) “good practice in a specific context may be inadequate tomorrow, which is why an understanding of the process is more useful than just practices for sustaining long-term positive outcomes.”

The nature of best practice approach predominantly utilized in organisations is initially defined to support employees work-life responsibilities and commitments. Brown (2005) found that the utilization of best practice approach of work life integration does not only benefit employees, but also organisations and employers with an open mind to this approach somehow succeed in attracting valued employees and maintain a motivated staff whereby delivering positive outcome. In the interim to promote work life balance organisations should adopt best practice approach that would encourage flexibility and positive results in both employees and employers.

So perhaps incorporating family-friendly policies and practices in the workplace could make a difference for employees with a lot of responsibilities, commitments and work life situations. However Hein (2005) argued that family-friendly policies and practices can assist employees with the complexity of work life issues. Hein (2005) explain further that even though policies and practices exist, however employees tend to be hesitant to proceed to use them because of career concerns or the fact that line managers discourage them from using it. All the authors here are simply emphasizing that employers should create a family-friendly organisational culture approach where employees and senior managers must be in favour of such practices and should be seen using the same practices.