22-08-2012, 11:53 AM
WORK LIFE BALANCE- Key to a fulfilling life
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Work life balance is a person’s control over the responsibilities between their work place, family, friends and self. A successful Work Life Balance strategy reduces stress levels and raises job satisfaction in the employee while increasing productivity and healthcare costs for the employer.
An individual's life can be divided into six basic quadrants - workplace, family and friends, community, hobbies, sleep and sport/exercise.
An integral part of our lives is our profession. Just as there is responsibility and opportunity in life, our careers are also guided by opportunities and responsibilities. We must ensure that these two factors don’t work at cross-purposes. Quality of life is something we all covet.
Work life balance – special emphasis on women and family
Today’s career women are continually challenged by the demands of full-time work and when the day is done at the office, they carry more of the responsibilities and commitments to home.
The attitude of female workers has also changed. Women are growing more ambitious as they become key players in the world of work, contributing to major company successes. The impact of the female boss is considerably more powerful than ever before.
The pressure for women to achieve drives them to work harder and for longer, especially when wanting to prove themselves against their male counterparts.
Majority of women work 40-45 hours per week. Their lives were a juggling act that included multiple responsibilities at work, heavy meeting schedules, and business trips, on top of managing the daily routine responsibilities of life at home. “Successfully achieving work/life balance will ultimately create a more satisfied work force that contributes to productivity and success in the work place.”
WLB and FAMILY:
Successful parenting, the culture of care and selflessness that are part of family life requires energy, time, patience and tolerance for mess and confusion….a tall order when the working day has proved stressful and long. The key question here is who find’s time to care for whom? For what happens is that time-consuming listening part of relationships gets to feel unloved and react accordingly. Families need nurturing, and our responses have to be sufficiently deep and elastic to accommodate the unexpected, not just the scheduled bits that fit in neatly with our jobs.
An increasing number of young children are being raised by a child care provider or another person other than a parent, and older children are more likely today to come home to an empty house and spend time with video games, television and the internet, with less guidance to offset or control the messages coming from these sources. No one knows how many kids are home after school without an adult, but they know the number is in the millions. Also, according to a study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the “more time that children spent in child care, the more likely their sixth grade teachers were to report problem behavior.”
The demand for work life balance solutions by employees and managers is expanding at an unprecedented rate. As a result, work-life balance is an increasingly hot topic in boardrooms and government halls today. Over the coming decade it will be one of the most important issues that executives and human resource professionals will be expected to manage.
Employer’s role in Work Life Balance
Majority of employers support the concept of WLB. In fact it has become a legal necessity where the concept of “Equal Opportunity Employer” is almost mandatory. On the other hand, it is seen as a business compulsion for them in terms of retention of talent and productivity in all sectors of the industry. In a time when attrition is a major concern in all sectors, they feel it wise to adopt worker friendly practices.
GETTING THE BALANCE RIGHT
Until recently, most organizations have taken one-sided “systems” approach to their work-life efforts. Their focus has been on adopting organization policies, benefits, and procedures to solve the work life balance problem. Although helpful, the systems approach overlooks a critical fact: at its core, work life balance is more an individual issue that affects the organization than it is an organizational issue that affects the individual.
Systems Approach:
The systems approach is where in the company efforts to create a balance in your work life. If your organization is like most, you have already built a fairly solid left leg. You have health insurance, vacation time, various benefits, and possibly education programs or flexible work policies. It is important to reinforce what you have, but it may also be valuable to implement some potentially quick hit opportunities that have proven to have high impacts in certain organizations