Relationship With Employees Keeping High

Relationship With Employees

Keeping high quality employees in the industry has become a complicated affair in the modern work environment. In many professions there are shortages of quality employees with the experience necessary to perform certain business functions. Therefore employers must offer competitive compensation and benefits packages to ensure that their employees are content in their positions and not looking for better offers from competitors. One tool that has become a buzz word in the employee relations area has been work-life balance. Allowing employees to have flexibility in terms of their scheduling and vacation times can be a valuable asset to many employees and can reduce their intentions to quit. This analysis conducted literature review in regards to employee relationships and how they are affected by the work-life balance. Furthermore, a human resources professional was also interviewed to get their opinion on the effectiveness of offering work-life solutions to employees. It was found that the work-life focus was valuable to many employees but can also be subject to abuse by some employees.

Literature Review

The issue of "work-life quality" has become critical in the last two decades due to the increasing demands of today's business environment and family structure (Akdere, 2006). Employees are often expected to produce more in regards to their personal productivity which can put stress on their family and consequently make family life tough for employees in many circumstances. Human resource development (HRD) and work/life share several goals as both are concerned with ensuring workers are effective and with the "business case" justifying their efforts within organizations (MacDermid & Wittenborn, 2007). The total hours worked, work overload, and gender inequality can all be powerful forces that are commonly associated work-life balance.

The work-life balance and flexibility for job requirements have shown to be a policy that can provide a competitive advantage in maintaining a qualified staff. Results from a national sample of 527 U.S. firms suggest that organizations with more extensive work-family policies have higher perceived firm-level performance and furthermore there was also a correlational relationship between work-family bundles and firm performance is stronger for older firms and firms employing larger proportions of women (Perry-Smith & Blum, 2000). Furthermore, it has been suggested that work-life balancing can also increase an individual's overall level of well-being outside of work just as it can improve employee satisfaction (Al-Qutop, Mohi-Adden, & Harrim, 2011).

Despite all the success stories of work-life balancing, there are many obstacles that can prevent such policies from being effective in some organizations. Being flexible with hours in the office and allowing employees to work from home or work irregular hours can have many problems in some professions and some industries. four financial services organizations have approached the work-life balance agenda and examines the fit between the organizational intentions for work-life policy and actual outcomes for both organizations and employees and found that what managers were being asked to achieve in the business was often incompatible with formal work-life policies (Wise & Bond, 2003).

Interview

A human resources professional was interview from a local firm that employed a wide range of different employees that were performing organizational functions at different levels. The manager was responsible for a large number of employees and has a significant amount of experience with work-life initiatives. The human resource manager had somewhat mixed emotions about implanting such policies with many employees. He had both good experiences with a work-life program as well as a number of negative experiences. He seemed to think that the positive ones were about equal to the negative ones.