Work-life balance benefits include increased employee retention, decreased
absenteeism, fewer sick leave requests, job flexibility, increased productivity, reduced
employee stress levels and an enhanced corporate culture
Many organizations use to look ways for reducing their costs and streamlining their operations. Many companies are trying to have a check so that they could look at ways of reducing payrolls as company’s payroll is typically its biggest cost base. Most of the companies are formulating strategies to avoid redundancies within their organizations. As such, there is a renewed interest in workforce flexibility and how this could provide employees with more personal time and reduce costs for employers.
Traditionally, temporal terms of employment have been determined unilaterally by the employer according to their operational needs. In sectors with strong union representation, employees may have been able to negotiate terms for working time, but its formal provision was in the hands of employers. And this remains so, despite the right to request flexible working introduced in 2005. There has been no formal expectation on employers to accommodate to the out-of-work needs of employees. Any conflicts between work and home were expected to be resolved in the private domains of the employee with minimal interference to work. Management attitudes toward work-life conflicts can be surprisingly resistant to change. The 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) study shows that 69 per cent of managers in the private sector believe that it was the responsibility of individuals to balance their work and domestic demands ([15] Kersley et al. , 2006, p. 271). A recent study indicated that spill-over from work to home was absorbed largely through adjustments employees made to their domestic lives ([13] Hyman et al. , 2005).