Work Life Balance Is Dead By Isabel Rimanoczy Summary

Life balance was really no surprise to me. I often put my work life ahead of everything else. I strive to be the best that I can at work, and I am striving to better myself and achieve a management position. I feel that if I make sacrifices now, in the future I will have more time to devote to my family life. I am beginning to realize I am missing out on my children’s childhood and need to make an effort to be there more for my

Work-life balance is a concept that supports the efforts of employees to split their time and energy between work and the other important aspects of their lives. It is a daily effort to make time for family, friends, community participation, spirituality, personal growth, self-care, and other personal activities, in addition to the demands of the workplace. Work-life balance will vary for each person and will change throughout life.

While observing a common debate on “work-life balance” Richard Dorment forms his own opinion on the topic. He informs the reader that the focus of this debate may be solely on the side of women, but the less popular front of men balancing the “work-life” is just as important as that of the side supporting the women. In the article “Why Men Can’t Have It All” he addresses key points that pull the side of men not commonly seen into the light. Dorment supports this idea with rhetorical appeals of pathos, logos, and ethos.

In the textbook, Family Life Now, the author, Kelly J. Welch, discusses the ten strategies for family and work balance. Obviously, sometimes the stressors in life and the struggles that work brings can definitely effect people and inhibit a relationship from being successful. According to a 2001 study examining “47 married couples who appear to successfully manage both spheres” (Welch, 409), the 10 major strategies to balance family and work are as follows: “Value Family, Strive for Partnership, Derive Meaning from Work, Maintain Work Boundaries, Be Focused and Productive at Work, Prioritize Family Fun, Take Pride in Dual Earning, Live Simply, Learn to Say “No”, and Value Time” (Welch, 410). Out of these ten strategies, I would like to focus on the seven that I think are the most beneficial and necessary to have in a balanced relationship.

Thesis: When there is a cohesive balance between work and family life, it leads to a more productive working environment and family atmosphere.

As a leader/manager there are many things you can do to maintain and achieve a good work/life balance. Some of these things could be:

If this balance is actively pursued by the organization, changes and implementations can be made to align it with its balance goals. Elissa Tucker (2012) performed an analysis on companies considered benchmarks for work-life balance. Tucker found that best practices offer support for dual-career families, work-at-home policies and practices, and flexible hours. These common proceedings among industry standards are aligned with one common theme: flexibility. An organization with flexibility in regards to employees’ personal lives has an advantage in retaining and satisfying top talent. It is with flexibility that organizations are able to accommodate the requests and concerns generated by work-life balance conflicts. Organizations that are able to serve effectively the requests of its employees do not always resort to protocols. Finding a solution to an employee’s needs may come from not having a policy as much as having one. Flexibility is, in essence, the ability to find solutions. Today’s work environments are becoming more varied by the task and setting than ever before. An organization structured in a way that provides alternative and flexible work schedules can have an extreme impact on its employees’ work-life balances. Life comes with many uncertainties. Employees have many responsibilities and perform many roles. Flexible work

The current economic situation has been blamed for causing income loss, extended working hours and intense stress in workplaces all over the world. Due to this today people are being challenged to strike a balance between work life and family life. People are overwhelmed by the demanding careers, demanding families, a slow economy and so on. This has left people with little time for what they need and want to do.

The article Manage your work, manage your life discusses the popular topic of work and life balance. Interviews were conducted and researched with over 4,000 executives worldwide and 82 executives in a leadership course over a five-year course (Groysberg and Abrahams, 2014). They broke down and compared men and women to determine how they defined what professional success means to them, what personal success means and what their partners contribute (Groysberg and Abrahams, 2014). The survey data showed some true gender differences on what each values more. A large number of women define professional success by their individual achievement over everything else. Men on the other hand define it by making a difference, next to working with a good team in a good environment and respect from others (Groysberg and Abrahams, 2014). When asked what personal success meant to men and women both chose rewarding relationships with family, people they love and community at the

There is a problem with health related issues in Black women involved in leadership roles. Despite the decline of Black women in professional roles, most encounter the task of attempting to balance work-life and home with a husband and kids. According to a poll conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, forty percent of black women say they experience frequent stress, compared with 51 percent of white women; stress associated with ensuring a suitable lifestyle and working against the stereotypes created by society (Thompson, 2012). Warner (2014) compiled an online fact sheet that notes women of color make up 36.3 percent of the nation’s female population and approximately

In today’s work environment a better balance between work and life is increasingly desired by workers. Desire for a better work-life balance has become one of the growing concerns in contemporary society (Wood and de Menezes (2010, p.1575). Therefore it is essential for organisations to incorporate work-life balance strategies with job design and employment policies. According to Wood and de Menezes (2010, p.1575), work-life practices have come to the front position of employment policies in a number of countries in the past ten years. Nankervis et al. (2011, p586) suggest that work-life balance (WLB) 'recognises that employees have different personal needs (e.g. childcare, ageing parents) which need to

A good professional person is one who is able to maintain the gap between his/her personal and professional life. S/he does face problems in both the roles of life, but they know how to cope up with that so that their work as well as that personal life may not get disturbed. There was a time when the link and boundary between the personal life and professional life was vivid, but due to the growing challenges that are faced by the organizations, the workload is highly increased. Employees started working for late hours and targets achievement became more important than any other thing. This made the organizations to become more rigid in terms of achieving goals. Especially those people, who have their families and kids, are facing much difficulty in managing their work and their families. Organizations now expect more work from their professional people and believe on the fact of "lean and mean" (Hall & Richter, 1989).

A literature review discussing the ways in which modern life choices are affecting the average work life balance of an employee. Scholars have debated the meaning of the term “work–life balance” in the literature for a number of years. Some authors prefer to use the more traditional label of “work– family” in recognition of the fact that for many people, the job and the nuclear family constitute the role domains that demand the greatest amount of time, attention, and energy and are most likely to come into conflict with one another (Kossek, Baltes, & Mathews, 2011). The work life balance of the average worker is changing more and more per year. When the main employer was labour it was very easy for employees to switch off from their jobs

“Critically discuss the importance of work-life balance in the effective management of people at work in contemporary organisations.”

As life is getting developed the living style is getting high in several regions around the world which shape a more expensive life that leads male and female for more working hours or to have more than one job to get affluent life. The prior factor additionally the following factors, the workforce is getting older and technology has changed the way we work rapidly, Set off alarm bells of a significant problem which is the conflict between paid work, unpaid work and personal time hence the significance of this phenomenon requires a solution that is able to resolve this phenomenon properly which can be the balance between the work and the life. Work Life balance can be defined as "the degree to which an individual is simultaneously able to balance the temporal, emotional and behavioral demands of both paid work and family responsibility". (Hill et al cited in Sarker, Xiao, Sarker & Ahuja, 2012).