Promoting healthy worklife balance
Introducing work-life balance can bring substantial benefits to businesses as well as their employees, helping to increase motivation and productivity.
Clearly, employees benefit directly from good work-life balance. But it’s not just a staff benefit for which there is a business cost. The benefits to the organisation can include (according to organisations such as the Equal Opportunities Commission and Employers for Work-Life Balance):
- Increased employee morale
- Reduced absenteeism and lateness
- Improved staff retention, particularly of experienced staff
- Increased productivity and improve customer service
- A wider pool of high quality candidates from which to recruit, through offering more appealing working conditions
- Greater employee commitment to business goals
- Increased the willingness of employees to be flexible in times of business need or change.
Realising these benefits means overcoming a number of specific barriers to flexible working practices within the organisation:
- The perception that they are an accommodation to women with children and not a business issue
- Management resistance: the concern that the ‘flood gates will open’, and the organisation will not have the staff resources available to meet its objectives
- The perception that flexibility is career inhibiting – employees worry that it will stop them from achieving promotions
- Cultural factors e.g. focus on headcount, long hours culture
- Lack of clear purpose in introducing flexible working practices
- Inconsistency in how flexible working is applied
To overcome these, the organisation should have a clear plan for how work-life balance can enhance the organisation’s effectiveness, through supporting employee wellbeing. Effective approaches incorporate:
- A framework to request, review and implement flexibility focused on the organisation’s needs, and the scope to meet individual needs within them
- A fair, consistent application and decision making process
- A broad menu of options and practical implementation with detailed guidelines
- Specific training, especially of managers, to raise awareness.
Increasingly, work-life balance solutions are becoming expected, and even enshrined in law. For example, there are recently introduced statutory rights for working parents to request flexible working in certain circumstances.
Other legislation - e.g. against discrimination - may also apply when dealing with requests for flexible working.
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