The Impact Of Modern Life Choices On The Average Work Life Balance

Work-life balance has been a popular topic for employees across all age and occupations for years, representing a rising concern of contemporary human resource management and labor policies. This topic has attracted the attention from the millennium generation, who is stepping into the market and beginning to grow a career. Therefore considering the increasing demand, well-designed workforce planning with diverse scheduling options offered to employees appears to be extra credits for most companies. This research paper aims to communicate the positive effects of four-day workweek, and providing support for why employers should adopt this schedule for employees and themselves through 1) introducing background and history of four-day workweek as a work schedule option and 2) demonstrating benefits of four-day workweek from both employer and employees’ perspectives.

In the case brought to us in the text, it gave us two examples of employees seeking work life balance. The first example is a man that has risen in the ranks at his company. Instead of having less working as he had thought, he faced much longer work hours with very little time with his family. In the second example a woman is looking at changing companies and in her negotiations she negotiates items such as a flexible work schedule. Although this option works well for the women it does not work for every employee.

If simplified, the disconnect in family life can be put into a broader category of the consequences that come with the length of time an individual spends in the workplace. Thus, the disconnect in family life transforms from merely a personal trouble for the Filimundus employees into a social issue of the length of time spent in the workplace. The historical factors behind the traditional eight-hour workday come from the Industrial Revolution, where new companies started to maximize the output of their factories by having workers in the factory all day in order to run the machinery. Eight-hour shifts allowed for exactly three rotations of employees running the machines for twenty-four hours straight, repeating each day. However, companies began to exploit their workers and made them grind out even longer shifts. Henry Ford was the man who officially installed a policy of an eight-hour workday, giving his employees a limit to how long they could work (Widrich 2014). The Industrial Revolution also brought about the disconnect in family life. No longer were families a unit, because they did not have to toil together on the farm. Instead, parents entered the work force and children attended school, separating the family. This history behind the eight-hour workday shows how it affected and still affects the modern and postmodern

Ms. Isabel Rimanoczy made great points in this article. Though some may view her as a work body, she and I share a mutual understanding when it comes to work-life balance. Ms. Rimanoczy is not buying the idea that there is some sort of balance between the two aspects of our lives. “Work-life balance is dead” and it may be a good thing” (Rimanoczy, 2015). I agree with her statement because if anyone takes the time to think about it, they will soon come to terms with the idea that it really becomes impossible to separate work and personal life. Some of us grow up with moral values, standards, and family traditions carried on through religious beliefs. When we go to work we will bring along our character because our personal life defines us as

There is widespread acceptance of humanity’s recent evolution. The Industrial Revolution is commonly regarded as the origin of the capitalist working order. Since the early 19th century people have been focusing more and more on their job performance and less and less on their personal enjoyment. Even though some, in recent years, have started to promulgate a better work life balance, the recent economic crisis has not done much for this feeble equilibrium.

Arlie Russell Hochschild presents an interesting phenomenon in her work The Time Bind. She explains that “The more attracted we are to the world of work, the more its deadlines, its cycles, its pauses and interruptions shape our lives and the more family time is forced to accommodate to the pressures of work.” The attempt to balance personal and professional lives is a growing challenge for today’s working parents, who are seeing a change in the amount of time they spend at work and home, all of which depends on “the nature of a person’s job, company, and life at home.” In her book, Hochschild presents a case study of employees working at Amerco, a Fortune 500 firm that “had been identified as one of the ten most ‘family-friendly’ companies in America by the Families and Work Institute, by Working Mother magazine, and by the authors of Companies that Care.” In an attempt to keep from spending money to hire workers every time a parent left his or her position, Amerco began offering “options for part-time work, job sharing, and flextime,” only to find that many employees do not take advantage for their opportunities,

Work-life balance is a combination of interactions among different areas of one’s life; the advantages and disadvantages associated with that balance/imbalance are countless and can affect multiple levels of society (Schoenfeld, 2005).

Hill, E. J., Hawkins, A. J., Ferris, M. and Weitzman, M. (2001), Finding an Extra Day a Week: The Positive Influence of Perceived Job Flexibility on Work and Family Life Balance*. Family Relations, 50: 49–58. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3729.2001.00049.x

In this national conversation about work-life balance, not many have focused on the issue of the struggles of men in balancing work life and family life and how both genders truly can’t “have it all”. But rather the spotlight is focused on the mostly one-sided arguments created in both “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” by Anne-Marie Slaughter and “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg. In both essays, the idea of ambitious women not being able to have it all is discussed, but in reality, nobody

it tough, now more than ever, to balance work with a family. The standard used to be

Often there is this perception even today that males are the breadwinners for the family—why is it that females, still today, cannot be considered breadwinners? According to Pew Research, equal pay comes down to reasons why women leave the work force temporarily—reduction of hours to take care of family, time taken off to have a baby, leaving their job, or even saying no to a promotion (Patten, 2015). The biggest category of the aforementioned is the reduction of hours. Why is it only women reduce their hours to take care of family? Where is the unified efforts of the mother and father to equally take care of family? This author believes that if you first look towards that question, you can slowly over time dispel the still existent notion that women aren’t

Firstly, it has been noted that many UK workers are generally “unaware of their work-life entitlements following the implementation of work-life balance practices” (Kodz et al., 2002 and Lewis et al., 2000, cited in Beauregard & Henry 2009). This situation can result in dissonance, as employers have total control over which work-flexible practices to present, to discard or implement, while the employee will not possess any control. Not to mention that, there seems to be a substantial variance between the people who

In the workplace, advances in technology has allowed us to work in ways that weren’t possible in the past. Constraints like location, have become more of a non-issue, and we are more connected to the office than ever before. However, when it comes to balancing those capabilities with our personal lives, for some, that might be a daunting task. While times are indeed changing, technology isn’t hurting us, instead its allowing us to find more of a balance. A study by Accenture, titled “Defining Success,” found that technology played a large role in achieving work-life balance. More than three-quarters of the 4,100 business executives surveyed, thought technology enabled flexibility within their schedules. Eighty percent stating that a flexible work schedule is important to achieve a positive work-life balance.

Work-life balance has become a primary concern in both society and a big number of organisations in the globalised world. Furthermore, according to Sok, Blomme and Tromp (2014), this issue now becomes more difficult to make decisions for people who are in charge of management positions. Ideally, to cope with this prominent issue, the notion of flexible working is created; however, this also brings significant challenge. These aspects will continue being basic concerns in the future due to the fact that our world of work changes across the time. From these reasons, personally, I chose this topic to gain in-depth understanding about aspects which delight comprehensive human-being in workplace. In this report, I will shed light on the summary of the topic and my individual reflection when running this.

Researchers have argued that work-life balance practices have impacts on work performance, interpersonal relations, improvement in productivity and reduction on turnover rate (Beauregard and Henry, 2009). In this essay, the writer mainly focuses on the discussion of how work-life balance influence employee retention. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that work-life balance plays an important role in retaining employees.