21-10-2016, 02:27 PM
1460358354-WORKLIFEBALANCE4.docx (Size: 24.42 KB / Downloads: 22)
ABSTRACT
In order to promote the notion of work-life balance as an organizational value and to help individuals to achieve ‘harmony’ in their life, it is important to understand what work-life balance actually means to people, what their expectations are and how these can be met by organizational policies and working patterns. India Inc is now increasingly taking to flexible working hours at the office as it finds that it helps in containing costs and pushing up employee productivity. Various provisions had been brought out by the government to meet work-life balance of employee. In recent days, One-fifth of businesses regard flexible working as a solution that helps attract a wider talent pool (nearly 21 per cent) and even allow them to employ valuable people that live in more remote parts of their country (19 per cent).Flexible working hours encourage target based and goal oriented achievement rather than focus on an hour based approach. This paper focuses on the various the various flexible work arrangements that are followed in the corporate and employees attitude towards the work life balance.
INTRODUCTION
While considering the work life balance, the first thing that sticks our mind is, Do we live to work or we work to live? Research has shown that work and home are the two most main domains in the life of an employed person. For many workers, the day is not ended when they go home. Individuals who have better balance between the work and family have a superior job satisfaction and execute better in their position. They have a greater loyalty and a superior level of trust .Nowadays employers are cutting cost mainly through lay-offs and are placing more demands on the lean staff left behind. The excuse is to stay afloat in the wake of a global economic recession. The implication however, is that the more time and energy employees give to work, the less they have to give to the other important aspects of their lives, thus creating a work-life imbalance, which creates negative consequences for both the employee and the organization.
WORK-LIFE IN INDIA
Work-life balance, in its broadest sense, is defined as a satisfactory level of involvement or ‘fit’ between the multiple roles in a person’s life.As India continues to emerge as a global economic power, understanding the dynamics between work and personal lives specific to this culture is increasingly important.
WORK-LIFE BALANCE PROGRAMMES IN INDIA
The economic liberalization and the resultant inflow of foreign direct investment andForeign institutional investment contributed to the growth of Indian economy. India is anattractive destination, for many multinational corporations, because of its highly talented and young work force. The companies in India have realized that they are required to adopt strategic human resources practices similar to western countries.
Now days numbers of dual income families are steadily growing. It’s high time to the companies in India to wake up to the needs of the work force. Many employers in India have started to study the impact of female employees’ entry into the work force. Additional organizational support in the form of flexible work arrangements, child care, elder care and family leave policies is required to have competitive advantage. The report of the committee on the status of women in India revealed the fact that, despite the laws and International Labour Organization’s Convention, maternity and child care benefits were available to only 3-5% of Indian women employees in the organized sector. Most of the Indian organizations are characterized by inflexible employment practices, with less attention paid to child care and elder care needs of the employees.
PROVISIONS FOR WORK LIFE BALANCE
The Maternity Benefits Act of 1961 entitles a woman to 12 weeks of leave with full pay associated with the birth of a child. Under this act, it is unlawful for an employer to discharge or dismiss a woman during or on account of maternity leave, except for gross misconduct. Further, a woman worker must be permitted to take 2 nursing breaks in addition to normal breaks until the child is 15 months old.
As per the Factories Act of 1948, an employer must provide child care facilities for children below the age of 6 where more than 30 women workers are employed. A factory, according to the act, is any organization with a minimum of 10 workers engaged in manufacturing on any day of the preceding twelve months. The Factories Act also provides guidance on minimum and maximum working hours along with lunch breaks and small breaks. In addition, there is provision for annual leave with wages for workers, and conditions to regulate shift work, overtime and night shift work.
In India many of the laws passed lack teeth, as organiza¬tions find ingenious ways of circumventing them. For in¬stance, some employers bypass the Factories Act requiring them to provide child care facilities by employing fewer than 30 women as permanent employees and the rest as part-time or contract labor.
WORK-LIFE BALANCE OPTIONS
Employers are realising that the quality of an employee‘s personal and family life impactswork quality and that there are concrete business reasons to promote work and non-work integration. Organisations decide tofacilitate their employees‘work-life balance, and choose from a wide array of optionsthat includes:
(a) Flexi-time
Flexi-time is a scheduling policy that allows full-time employees to choose starting andending times within guidelines specified by the organisation. It works well for full-timeoffice staff, but not in shift patterns or in a production line. Flexi-time allows anemployee to attend to non-work demands without having to take time off work.
(b) Compressed working hours
This is a system of a four day working week. An employee can work his total number ofagreed hours over a shorter period. For example, an employee can work his or her hoursover four days in a week instead of five, and thus, gains a day for himself.
© Job-sharing
Job-sharing is a system where two people share a job. They both have the same job, butsplit the hours, so that each employee has a part-time position. Apart from splitting thehours, they also split the payments, holidays and benefits. The idea is to afford employeesample time to attend to non-work activities so as to be able to achieve a good measure ofwork-life balance.
(d) Breaks from work
By taking breaks from work once in a while, the right balance between work and life canbe achieved. These breaks should not only be about maternity, paternity and parentalleave, but also time off for career breaks and sabbaticals.
(e) Self-rostering
Employees can roster their hours the way they want to. The organisation checks everyday the number of staff and skills required and lets the employees then decide which ofhours they would like to work. Employees are thus able to schedule their timeconveniently between work and non-work activities.
(f) Teleworking
Employees, with the aid of modern communication technology carry out their jobswithout necessarily having to be at the office. Often, they can work from home or insatellite offices (telecentres) rented by the organisation close to where they live.Teleworking allows employees to attend to family or non-work issues so long as it doesnot affect their output or the quality.
(g) Child care
People with families do not have the luxury to stay at home anymore and take care of thechildren. The trend is towards dual-earning families as life has become too expensive tolet a potential money-maker stay at home. Thus, the demand for child care options as ameans of helping employees achieve work-life balance is becoming increasinglyimportant. Some popular child care options include Crèche, Day-nursery,After school child care, Teen care, Host parent care, and Leader-at-home.
ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSES TO WORK-LIFE ISSUES IN INDIA
In the private sector, most of the companies offering well-defined work-life programs are multinational and in the IT and ITES sectors. The motivation for multinational companies to offer family-friendly measures to their Indian subsidiaries is partly to maintain uniformity in HR prac¬tices globally, partly in response to the demands placed on them by younger men and women employees, and partly as a tool to retain talent.
Real pressure to offer unique and relevant family-friendly measures is being faced by local Indian companies in the IT and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sectors. The rapid growth of these sectors during the last decade has resulted in the employment of young women in large numbers with long work hours. In their early years these companies tended to imitate Western work-life practices in form but not in spirit. Today their motivation behind offer¬ing work-life programs is a genuine desire to reduce stress and retain talented employees. For instance, one local BPO firm near New Delhi acted on an employee’s sugges¬tion that mothers would like to see their children being cared for in on-site day care centers by building glass walls for the day care center and providing electric outlets on the other side of the wall, where women can work while feeling close to their children.
Two examples of well known Indian companies offering wellness initiatives to their employees to help manage stress are Infosys Technologies and Wipro. Infosys Tech¬nologies, a leading IT service provider, has a wellness initiative called Health Assessment Lifestyle Enrichment (HALE). The initiative consists of a portal for online dis¬semination of information on various stress-related issues and a hotline whereby employees can directly receive counseling and expert opinions. The data from the portal and the hotline help the HR department to track key indica¬tors like absenteeism rates and link them with causes and resultant billing losses. These data also help to measure the effectiveness of the initiative in terms of improvement in productivity. Based on these inputs, HR takes suitable actions to deal with the prevalent wellness issues in the organization.
For Wipro, a leading player in both the IT & BPO sectors, encouraging employee wellness is an integral part of the corporate culture. This is reflected in Wipro’s numerous health and safety initiatives which supplement health-relat¬ed benefits. Some of these are nutrition consulting, health centers, medical camps, and regular well-being events like the annual Wipro marathon. The most successful Wipro project is one called Mitr which means ‘friend’ in Hindi. In this program, 28 employees, all volunteers, were trained to counsel fellow employees to manage stress. Mitr signifies to employees that they do have a friend in Wipro and that they should be able to confide and share their problems with a safe ally in the company.
The Tata Group has a culture of investing in several commu¬nity development programs that have the theme of women’s empowerment. In the Tata Motors plant at Pune there are several cooperatives managed and run by the wives of com-pany employees. These cooperatives, called grihini udyogs, provide the company with a variety of products ranging from cables for vehicles to chapattis (Indian bread) for its cafete¬ria. The cooperatives provide extra income for employees and their families. The women are paid the government-prescribed minimum wage and they also receive all statutory benefits. Most of the cooperatives’ products are sold to Tata Motors, though some — like pickles, condiments and bags — are also sold in the open market.
IBM India undertakes measures for the advancement of women and for promoting workplace flexibility as part of its global diversity initiatives that are based on the three pillars of equal opportunity, affirmative action and work-life programs. These measures are focused on mentoring and coaching for women, attending internal and external conferences and symposia, participating in steering com¬mittees, emphasizing executive and technical resources programs, regularly carrying out work-life employee sur¬veys, and developing diversity-specific hiring programs.
Johnson & Johnson India established the Women’s Lead¬ership Initiative (WLI) in 2002 with the support of top management. WLI is aimed at removing barriers to the advancement of women within the company and at attract¬ing and developing women leaders in the company. The organization is committed to fostering a culture of inclu¬sion by building the much needed sensitivity around the topic of gender inclusion in the workplace. WLI has task forces created to work on areas of work-life integration, policy development, learning and career development, and networking. J&J India also undertakes several community initiatives focused on improving awareness of health is¬sues surrounding diabetes and AIDS, providing support to street children, orphans and tribal girls, and providing maternity and gynecological care to women in need.
RESTART is a program initiated at General Electric’s Technology Centre in Bangalore (John F. Welch Technol¬ogy Centre) oriented at hiring women technologists who are on a career break. RESTART contains a detailed flex program and manager training, access to a daycare facility through collaboration with another GE business, and spe¬cial pre- and post-maternity programs such as a ‘Mom to be’ relaxation room, ‘Mom to be’ car park, and a lactation room. RESTART hires are provided with mentors to guide them in “re-learning” the organization. After launching the RESTART campaign, GE has had 1.3 million web site hits, received over 1500 applications, and to date has already hired four RESTART technologists. In 2008, GE won the Smart Workplace Award, which is a national award provid¬ed to organizations with effective flex environment.
THE IMPACTS OF WORK-LIFE BALANCE PRACTICES
Over the last decade the evidence for the business benefits of work-life balance policies has been growing in volume and strength. The studies show strong links between work-life balance policies and reduced absenteeism, increased productivity and job satisfaction. Other benefits include improved recruitment and retention rates with associated cost savings, reduced sick leave usage, a reduction in worker stress and improvements in employee satisfaction and loyalty, greater flexibility for business operating hours, an improved corporate image.
‘Positive’ Impacts:
• Fostered good employment relations 88%
• Helped retain more female employees 79%
• Helped reduce absenteeism 66%
• Improved staff motivation and
• Commitment 64%
• Helped lower labour turnover 60%
• Helped increase productivity 50%
• Eased recruitment 49%
‘Negative’ Impacts
• Increased managerial workloads 37%
• Increased overall costs 31%
• Led to shortages of staff at key times 27%
• Base: 267(number of authorities responding to the question)
• Source: DETR survey of local authorities
Conclusion
Work-life balance programmes offer a win-win situation for employers and employees. In whichever way it is viewed, theexistence of effective work-life balance programmes in an organisation will do both theemployee and employer good. For the employer, work-life initiatives create positiveemployer branding, promote being an employer of choice, foster organisationalcitizenship, and support diversity initiatives. For the employee, there is lesser stress,increased happiness, motivation, and productivity, and a better chance of reaching both
personal and career goals satisfactorily. Working women in India expect
more support from their employer in matters relating to child care. The companies which are able to implement such strategy will definitely gain enormous competitive advantages for the recruitment and retention of educated and trained employees, especially women.