Today, in an always changing world, many multinational companies remain open for 24 hours. Their employees need to work in day shifts and night shifts and that can damage their work-life balance. So a lot of people face the problem of balancing work and family life. Based on a research made in the frame of the project "Be Family Friendly! Training and Consultance for the Companies in Bucharest and Ilfov "cofinanced by European Social Fund through POSDRU 2007-2013, the article is focused on the rethinking the work schedule and on the promoting work-life balance (WLB) in today's dynamic environment.
Today economy is demanding more qualified workers which causes the interaction between the workplace and personal lives to become increasingly complex. One of the consequences of this growth is that organisations have become more and more ''time hungry". Despite this, existing policies still reflect a prevailing ''breadwinner" model with a working husband and dependent ''housewife". This has resulted in conflict for working parents and caregivers who struggle to balance responsibilities in the absence of significant institutional supports.
The fact that certain policies have been availed of almost exclusively by women has helped to solidify the belief that the relationship between the labour market and the family is solely an issue for mothers of young children and consequently not applicable to all workers. Statutory regulations, such as the introduction of unpaid parental leave, have attempted to address the needs of working parents. However, in countries like Romania or Ireland the limited nature of these policies and lack of financial compensation does little to address the labour market shortage. Uptake of leave remains highly gendered and parental leave is a luxury few can afford to utilise fully. To date, most work-life balance arrangements have focused on reconciling work and family life and traditionally they have concentrated exclusively on women. Consequently, men are reporting a greater imbalance than women between their work and non-work life
A common problem identified in all the existing research literature is that there is no coherent theory
of exactly how, through which pathways, various working time arrangements influence employee
productivity, directly or indirectly (Kelly et al., 2008). Prior meta-analyses were driven by a set of
hypotheses derived from a wide range of theoretical models. For example, they are typically rooted in
some area within the occupational and organizational health psychology fields, applying models such
as “job demands” (work stress), “work adjustment”, “job characteristics” and “person-job fit”. The
industrial-organizational psychology approach, together with the human resource approach, form the
“business case” line of research. The labour-industrial relations literature frames the institutional and
workplace structural forces that give rise to either cooperation or conflict in the determination of
working time and flexibility practices (e.g. Brewster et al., 1996). The labour-industrial relations and
human resources approaches combine to observe whether, or establish that, it is in the long-term
interest of companies to adopt employee-centered flexibility of their own volition, abstracting from
national policies or standards various human resource practices that improve the health not just of
workers, but also of the firm or organization. Thus, most of the relevant research, particularly
regarding the consequences of flexible working time arrangements, has been conducted at the level of
the company.