Employee Productivity as a Function

¶ … employee productivity as a function of employee happiness achieved through work-life balance human resource policy. Employed at the same firm, the advantages of a firm's decision to hire two-career couples is the potential in a stable dual-income family, more adequately prepared to finance and cater to child-care and family structural issues. Potentially of more importance, is the redistribution of power to the male when his income is above a certain threshold in the dual-income relationship. "The results show that the relative income of husbands plays an important role in the labor supply decisions of married women." (Yongjin, 2010)

Therefore, the hiring of two-career couples reinforces old stereotypical gender roles in society such that the woman enables the male in the relationship as the caretaker and protector financially and emotionally. However, the income is the important variable and not the hours worked. If the income is a function of the hours worked, then the income derived may be of considerable harm to the female in the dual-income relationship. "Women have less time available to do paid work because they still are expected to do more housework and perform most of the care giving responsibilities." (NewsRx, 2010) in this particular study, the number of hours worked above a threshold of 50 hours created a constraint on the ability of women to perform necessary household maintenance.

As small company's now generate over 50% of new American jobs, the ability for these company's to alleviate the work-life issues associated with dual-income, child-rearing employees are increasingly imperative to the performance of the company as a whole. The 20th century established the role of the male as employed by the institution as the prominent employee-spouse relationship. "This combination of formal and informal institutional demands which is placed on both members of a married couple of whom only the man is employed by the institution is particularly prevalent in the middle-class occupations in the United States but is not restricted to them, or indeed to the United States." (Papanek, 1973) a smaller company is able to address these formal and informal institutional disparities such as employee counseling, child-care services, employee flex-time and generous maternity leave by adopting policies that may not offer services as comprehensively yet provide a remedy for critical issues facing working parents with working spouses. A company coupon redeemable at a participating child-care center can provide the financial and motivational incentive to seek proper care while handling work responsibilities. Adopting the program that enables employees to work from home by accessing their work pc is an innovative and inexpensive method to boost productivity by having employees leave work early or at their leisure to attend to personal matters. The best application is to have the employee on salary to effectively enable this form of work-life flexibility.

Dual career couples at different stages does pose an issue due to the burgeoning family rearing responsibilities and professional induced stress disorders. If the woman is a senior with 10 or more years of experience and the man is less experienced the problems associated are not as severe as if the man were working more due to experience than the woman. A man that works over 50 hours a week will create additional stress in managing the family on the woman. This in turn will lower her productivity at work and potentially create issues with her employer. The woman working more than 50 hours per week is only a problem to the psychological makeup of the man in the relationship. This poses conditional problems for the employer of the man as a feeling of inadequacy due to lower earnings or less recognition and responsibility at work can facilitate irrational acts of frustration that can have detrimental effects.