Providing work-life balance it has shown the employers and employees are a happier workforce and has a positive effect on the retention of staff and higher levels of motivation. Increase in performance levels have

Benefits of Work-life balance

Benefits for employees and employers

Providing work-life balance it has shown the employers and employees are a happier workforce and has a positive effect on the retention of staff and higher levels of motivation. Increase in performance levels have also been found, as employees are less tired, so therefore the work can be done more effectively

Having arrangements in place it enable employees to balance their work and other commitments, its helps the following:

Both mothers and fathers to care for their children
Those with caring responsibilities for older or disabled people
Employees to undertake study or training
People to play an active role in their local communities

Research from LRD found out that employees who have taken a specific leave, it allows skilled employees the opportunity to return early to work while balancing personal and domestic needs.

Work-life balance has also shown evidence employees’s control and confidence has increasingly taken control of their own careers. Moreover, individuals are beginning to define a successful career as it allows time and energy for activities outside of work.

Managers often work the longest hours and with the help of work-life balance practices their jobs can be done by part time, flexible workers or job sharing, this showed they outperform colleagues working standard full time hours. These managers working with the aid of work-life balance practices had greater problem solving and analysis skill and better planning and organisational skills than full-time managers.

The work-life balance 2001: Baseline study found that 91% of employers agreed that people work best when they can balance their work and other aspect of their lives.

Problems towards work-life balance

The demand for flexible work is increasing, not only the workers with caring responsibilities need flexible work, so do 18-24 years old as they would be more motivated at work if they had access to work-life balance schemes.

Usually managers may have limited access to work-life balance because they have higher authority and being decision makers, it becomes less difficult for ...

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The work-life balance 2001: Baseline study found that 91% of employers agreed that people work best when they can balance their work and other aspect of their lives.

Problems towards work-life balance

Usually managers may have limited access to work-life balance because they have higher authority and being decision makers, it becomes less difficult for them to adapt to work-life balance.

In some organisation it is argued that work-life balance polices is more favourable to women with children and other caring responsibilities.

Some evidence show that workers who take up work-life balance as a options, is often portrayed with lack of commitment to their career or towards the organisation.

They have work-life balance policy and implement it in reality

The London Borough of Camden Council

The London Borough of Camden Council has a workforce of 6600 employees; work-life balance was introduced in 2001 with the aim improving on the flexible working options open to staff. This mean the staff would benefit from:

Increased opportunities to work from home
More flexible hours
Compress working weeks

Camden realised that it need to change its culture and performance management system so that it ensure a greater emphasis on result and to erode a lingering culture of presenteeism.

For Camden to implement work-life balance, workshops were organised where the managers would be encourage to run and to discover ways of improving service while offering individuals better opportunities to work flexible.

When the flexible working was introduce 29% of staff felt that the system was not perfect but it was better than before and a step in the right direction.

There was 2.5% reduction in the cost of sickness absences and a reduction of 2% in staff turnover in the first year. It has also enable some departments to extend their opening hours.

The 2002 employee survey also highlighted the areas for improvement such as the employees were confused who was title to the policies and resourcing issues such as laptops. Some managers are unconvinced that work-life balance would work for their teams.

Although some of these issues have been resolve such as more resources being available and introducing case studies and success stories are disseminated among staff to communicate the availability of ideas.

In practice a small team, several members have taken up flexible working options and develop ways in which the team can meet business and personal needs. As a result the development is open for longer hours, the team has a more structured approach to carry out its workload and overall the team works better as a whole.

An employee comments, “The flexible working options are the best thing I have ever been offered by an employer. They have rekindled my enthusiasm and commitment to fulfil my role as a mental health broker.”

British Telecom (BT)

British Telecom (BT) workforce consists of 87,325 in the UK (March 2005) employees which delivers its telecommunication, Internet and IT services to millions customers.

Most of BT’s workers have responsibilities for others, children or elderly, disable or sick family and friends, with ageing UK population these demands on their people will increase and expert better work-life balance.

With the use of technology BT has transform the way the company runs to site-based workforce to an “eBT” this allow employees to be more flexible.

A common problem for BT was that often engineers had to leave customer premises due to lack of information which result to wasting time and decreasing customers satisfaction and enable flexible working.

BT has been able to achieve it increasingly demands of customers expectation by applying flexible workers, Bt now has over 9000 home workers, nearly 500 job shares and more than 5000 part-time workers.

BT has used its own technological products and services to implement this change. BT Broadband is used by employees at home, in the office, on customer premises or while travel 70% training is delivered on-line to employees at work or home.

Bt has changed their attitudes to enable flexibility manager have agree to flexible working request, performance focus and support facilities are provided though the “Achieving the balance” intranet site.

In practice the workers can now fulfil commitment around work. Now some of BT’s employees are long-term flexible workers. It allows some workers to work at different time and location as long they work full weekly hours.

Conclusion

Today in the employment industry the way people work is rapidly changing, the UK workforce is becoming more flexible and is adapting to environment changes. Most organisation do have some form of work-life balance polices but these can only be implemented if attitudes are flexible.

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