contemporary case studies in HRM report
Sam1994
WorkLifeBalanceNotes.pptxWork Life Balance
Objectives:
Understand the evolving contextual factors that have raised the importance of work-life-balance policies and practices
Critique the extent to which HRM policies, such as flexible working and Work-Life-Balance, are gender neutral
Banksy 2011
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Definition
What does WLB mean?
- different perspectives: middle class privilege (Warren, 2015); involuntary part-time work (Wilkinson et al, 2017)
Flexible working can include a business choosing when you work (e.g. 0 hours contracts) – ‘employee unfriendly’, Ch. 13 in core module text book
Work Life Balance – juggling demands of paid and unpaid work; work and leisure; many say that their life is their work and vice versa. Perspectives on this change all the time. Many of the discourse around it is linked to power and control - stress often arises where workers feel less in control of their time – both at the domestic and the paid work level; the higher paid, higher skilled jobs tend to be dominated by men, who statistically, work fewer domestic hours than women;
WLB concerns itself increasingly, not only with overwork, but also under-work – not enough hours to pay the bills; is it a middle class pre-occupation and privilege to work fewer hours or more flexibly to spend more time at home or on ‘life’.
48 hour working week was set in 1930 by the International Labour Organisation (Dinh et al, 2017) – it has not changed since then, despite being set at a time when few women worked outside the home and were carrying the full domestic burden. Paid work is no longer confined to the workplace – it can happen anytime any place anywhere thanks to technology (dependent on job) – carries advantages and disadvantages.
Gender plays a part
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Gender issues
Gender issues (BBC, 2017);
‘Menu’ solutions (e.g. First Direct);
Health – gender imbalance (Dinh et al, 2017)
Conflict between those who have children and those who do not – not just confined to women versus men, but mainly affects women: BBC article examines the resentment that can build up when only parents can work flexibly or get first call on school holidays etc; if you have no caring responsibilities then your leisure time is not as important; parents get to head home early when there’s a problem at home and the people with no caring responsibility shoulder the burden and work longer to compensate
Some organisations (e.g. FD) try and combat this by having a menu of benefits for their staff – can choose more holidays or paid childcare or sabbatical etc, - only problem with this is that in some places, while it is technically available equally to all it is more often granted to parents and mothers in particular – it is not expected that men will take it, so it affects attitudes and career progression.
Recent research (Dinh et al) suggests that work-life imbalance (ie trying to combine domestic chores with paid work) disproportionately has a negative affect on women’s health – both mental and physicial. This is because, although there are now more women in the workplace than ever before (in economically developed countries, the burden of domestic work has not adjusted accordingly – women continue to carry the majority burden.
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Millennials
Millennial issues – change in attitude (Carpenter et al, 2014)
Born after 1980
‘Net Generation, Digital Natives, NextGens, Generation Me, Generation Y, Baby Boomlets, Echo Boomers, the Boomerang Generation, and Generation Next’
‘Trophy kids’ (Carpenter et al)
Perception that ‘millennials’ are less tolerant of sacrificing leisure-time and lifestyle for work and are more demanding of employers; more loyal to people than to organisations and expect more help getting to where they want to go in their careers; flexitime is seen as a key strategy in attracting and retaining millennials (according to this research – Carpenter et al
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Benefits
To individual – maintain income; maintain career (to some extent);
To business in general – adapting to changing demographic talent pool
To organisations ( - longer term staff loyalty & retention)
To society – all ages etc economically active
Swedish experiment – 6 hour days, BBC 2017
Who takes responsibility? State versus organisation debate – varies, dependent on country (pp. 336, main text book)
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Downsides
To individual – career stall; pay gap; personal development and progression – lose momentum; female weighted
To business
To organisations – team development; efficiency; continuity; knowledge retention
To society
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HR Practices and Policies
Work From Home
Flexitime
Annualised Hours
On-site, subsidised childcare
Holiday childcare
Concierge
Part-time
Compressed hours
Family and carer’s leave
Provision of technology – e.g. phones, laptops, ipads
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Enablers
E.g. technology (but also has downsides – 24/7, work intensification (Kelliher et al)
E.g. industry
E.g. national culture and Government policy and practices (Wilkinson et al, Ch.13, 2017)
Govt policies which aid WLB and flexible working: 1. tax and benefits, parental leave policy, childcare provision
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Inhibitors
Hours of business
Structure of teams
Values and culture of the organisation
National culture
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References
Work–life balance/imbalance: the dominance of the middle class and the neglect of the working class, Warren, T, British Journal of Sociology, Volume 66, Issue 4, December 2015 Pages 691–717
Is flexible working biased against non-parents?, Caroline Bullock, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38656821 (accessed 27.01.2017), BBC, 2017
What really happened when Swedes tried six-hour days?, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38843341 (accessed 01.2017)
Doing more with less? Flexible working practices and the intensification of work, Kelliher, C. & Anderson, D., Human Relations 63(1) 83–106, Sage, 2010
Contemporary Human Resource Management, Text and cases, Wilkinson et al, 2017, Ch. 13
Mitigating Multi-generational Conflict and Attracting, Motivating & Retaining Millennial Employees by Changing the Organizational Culture: A Theoretical Model, Carpenter, M. de Charon, L., Journal of Psychological Issues in Organizational Culture, Vol 5, No. 3, 2014, Wiley
Hour-glass ceilings: work-hour thresholds, gendered health inequities, Dinh, H., Strasdins, L., Welsh, J., Social Science & Medicine 176 (2017) 42-51
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