Dual career couples: challenges and opportunities

Dual-Career Couples:

The employment of dual-career couples has continued to increase in the recent past to the point that these couples account for approximately 40% of today's workforce, a figure that will continue to increase in the future. This is a major shift from the traditional workforce making it a crucial concern for managers since there are many situations where two spouses have careers that are both important. The issue of dual-career couples has become a significant factor in decisions regarding recruitment, promotion, transfer and job commitment since more women are joining today's workforce. As a result of this increase, the advent of dual-career couples has not only caused problems for the working couples but it has also resulted in various challenges to businesses and organizations alike.

Policy Regarding Employing Dual-career Couples:

When employing dual-career couples, there are several concerns that must be taken into consideration by an organization or business. These concerns include the need for benefit plans that enable the dual-career couples to have children without endangering their careers and the need for flexible work schedules that assist them in balancing career and family demands. The other concerns include help from the employers in finding employment for the spouse in cases of job transfers and an effective child care program while at work. Ignorance of these needs associated with dual-career couples may make an organization to lose output and valuable employees (Ivancevich, 2010, p. 465). Given the increase in dual-career couples, many organizations have started to respond to these needs and challenges in various ways.

This policy is for the purpose of ensuring that dual-career couples in the organization are provided with an opportunity where they can work effectively without experiencing problems that are associated to these kinds of employees. To effectively deal with the issue of employing dual-career couples, the organization will be committed to hiring such employees based on their qualifications. This qualification-based recruitment strategy is aimed at lessening the prospect of losing competent employees on the basis that they are couples. As a major aspect in the policy, hiring dual-career couples is more beneficial to the organization as compared to dealing with challenges and problems associated with it.

Secondly, the organization will be committed to treat the dual-career couples as individual employees. Consequently, each spouse will be totally responsible for his/her performance at the workplace and will not be held liable for the other spouse's mistakes. None of the spouses in this organization will be permitted to bargain for a promotion or salary increment for the other spouse (Hannigan, 2010).

Finally, the organization will provide benefits to dual-career couples without regard to gender in order to reduce stress on families and employees alike. As the organization offers benefits with no regard to gender to dual-career couples, it will effectively meet some of the crucial needs of such kind of employees. One of these benefits is the provision of day-care assistance programs as well as child care referral services to the employees. As a result of the provision of this benefit, the policy ensures that parents continue working and increases its productivity. An example of such benefits that are not related to gender is offering child care leave to both spouses to ensure that both men and women employees participate in child care in their respective homes.

The other benefit without regard to gender is the provision of job sharing programs that permits two employees especially couples to share a job on a part-time basis. As part of the policy, the job-sharing program enables dual-career couples to proceed with their careers while taking care of their children.

Analysis:

A commitment to hiring dual-career couples enables the organization to reduce chances of losing competent employees especially when one spouse is transferred or get a new job in a different city or town. By hiring the dual-career couples, the organization will avoid experiencing a spouse's unpredictable employment issues. One of the major ways that many institutions have dealt with the issue of dual-career couples is discouraging the hiring of such individuals (Kantor, 1999). However, this strategy is an apparent discrimination against married couples and violation of the country's laws and regulations. Hiring such employees is critical for the organization since women are no longer house wives like in the past and are becoming professionals in various fields.

Secondly, by treating spouses as individual employees in the workplace, the organization reduces chances of receiving complaints from other employees concerning special treatment for couples especially if they are unqualified. Additionally, this policy enables the employee to only retain employees based on their performance rather than hiring an incompetent spouse in order to retain the other qualified partner.