Contemporary HR issues Blog #8 - What are the most important HR issues facing your organization today?

Evolution of work-Life balance

Work-life balance concept comes to platform in 19^th century with the workers’ Union campaign against the long working hours. In early 20^th century workers demanded for various flexibilities such as maximum cap on working hours. After sometimes, in 1980s companies started to promote more family friendly working policies in order to attract employees. Those family friendly work policies had telecommuting & flexible scheduling. Though these working comforts were implemented focusing on women workers initially, companies offered those family friendly work advantages to male workers as well.

During the initial stage of work-life balance concept it contained protect family life in competitive workplace & career focused society. But at present work-life balance concept has broad indicators such as health & safety at work, equality, labor market flexibility & international competitiveness. (Syed, 2015).

There are several definitions for Work-Life balance such as the relationship between the institutional and cultural times and spaces of work and non-work in societies (Felstead et al., 2002). Hill et al., (2001) expand the same concept & define work-life balance as how the individual properly balance the responsibilities & emotions in both work & home.

Thomas (2013) suggested that the biggest problem is work-life balance is time pressure. Time pressure is the difficulty faced by the employee to manage both official work & home work. Thomas named the said issue as Work-family conflict. Most of the time women employees are getting affected by the work-family conflict. Women employees would get frustrated when they failed to manage their time. Hence most of the women choose to do a part time or a seasonal job to have more work flexibility.

According to the UK labor market statics 43% of the female workers are employed in part time jobs where as only 13% male workers are engaged in part time jobs. (ONS, 2012) By looking at the fact we can define that the female workers are more concern about work-life balance.

References

Felstead, A., Jewson, N., Phizacklea, A. and Walters, S. 2002. Opportunities to work at home in the context of work–life balance, Human Resource Management Journal, 12: 54–76.

Hill, E.J., Miller, B.C., Weiner, S.P. and Colihan, J. 1998. Influences of the virtual office on aspects of work and work/life balance. Personnel Psychology, 51(3), 667–83.

ONS (Office for National Statistics) 2012. Gender Working Patterns. Available at: http://www.ons. gov.uk/ons/about-ons/business-transparency/freedom-of-information/what-can-i-request/index.html [Accessed 17^th June 2018 at 1.30AM]

Syed, J. (2015).Work-life balance. Managing Diversity and Inclusion: An International Perspective, pp.291-314. London: Sage.

Thomas, K.C. 2013. Work–Life Balance: A Sociological Study of Women Professionals in Kerala. Kerala: Mahatma Gandhi University.