Work Life Balance

Work Life Balance
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Work Life Balance
Introduction
A story is told of a career husband who arrives home after a trip only for his son to turn to the man’s wife and say “Mummy, uncle has come to visit.” This may sound like a joke but it is real to thousands of families that struggle to balance between their jobs, parenting, and personal responsibilities. The issue of work life balance has taken attention of employers, researchers, executives, psychologists as well as a huge number of other professionals. People have only 24 hours in a day and must use the time to ensure they allocate enough time to all of their responsibilities and still have time to nature their personal growth and development. Devoid of striking balance, many mishaps may be encountered which may adversely affect a person’s development and wellbeing as well as others within their circle of influence. This paper will focus on work life balance, factors leading to loss of work life balance and measures that can mitigate such factors.
Work life balance
According to Chick and The American Society for Training and Development (2004), work-life balance refers to the ability of an individual to strike equilibrium between their professional work, their private, and other roles in life. Professional work would involve a person’s job, career, and ambitions. Private life would include areas like family, marriage, spiritual life, health, and other relationships. Analogously, other roles may encompass issues like academic advancements, memberships, and leadership in different organizations and social contexts. Different scholars have defined work-life balance differently. For instance, Felstead, Jewson, Phizacklea and Walters (2002), defined work life balance as the relationship that exists between the institutional and cultural times and spaces of work and non-work in societies where income is predominantly generated and distributed through labor markets. Greenhaus, Collins, and Shaw (2003), on the other hand referred to work-life balance as the satisfaction and good functioning at work and at home with a minimum of role conflict. Despite the difference in the definitions, a majority of the scholars seemingly agree on three issues, which include work, family, and private life. Simply put, professionals should be able to strike a balance between work, private life, and family, in order to attain a work-life balance.
Factors contributing to loss of work life balance
Worldwide, the population has climbed up the wealth rankings to foster and improve their countries’ economies. Different nations’ output figures have resulted to countries’ competing in ensuring a majority of their population belong to the middle-income group. This in turn becomes good news to nations and their leaders as well as employers and entrepreneurs. These groups of people and companies are still working or have already achieved a 24-hour economy system. Concerning this, it is obvious that more flexibility is necessary in order to cover for the huge demand of goods and services. There is significant evidence of intensification of jobs and the fast pace has been linked to greater levels of stress in organizations and loss of work-life balance among the work force in any nation. Some of the factors contributing to the universal loss of work life balance have been discussed below:
Long working hours
Different countries have in place varying labor laws that stipulate how many hours employees are supposed to work in one day or one week with a few exceptions. For instance, the labor laws for countries in the European Union require their employees to work not more than forty-eight hours every week. However, people find themselves working for long hours in a bid to beat deadlines or boost their incomes. It is notable that the academic world has not defined the number of working hours that fulfill the conditions for long working hours. It is because the number of long working hours varies depending on factors such as the level of autonomy, extent of supervision, and whether the job is physical or not. However, Flechl (2010) argues that a study conducted in Australia revealed that men who worked more than forty hours every reported to experience work related stress. The same author further reveals that longer working hours are associated with an increase in work-life interference. Therefore, long working hours usually lead to fatigue and heightened levels of stress among the employees. As a result, many employees become unproductive but continue to work for reasons such as the aforementioned.
Family Life and Career Progression
Modern men and women commit to marriage and family from an average age of between 24 and 35 years. It is also during this time that they get into formal employment. This means that they have a lot of issues to deal with starting from keeping and maintaining their jobs, fulfilling the roles of a husband or a wife playing the role of a mother or father. It is also the time people are young and intend to advance their careers by taking academic or professional courses. This at times becomes too overwhelming especially for women who the traditional society expects them to perform their duties as both wives and mothers. As a result, women find it difficult to strike a balance and sometimes end up sacrificing either their job for their family or their family for their job. Perhaps it is why Flechl (2010) argues that women especially those ones from the West make difficult choices such as remaining single or childless in comparison to their male counterparts who the majority in most cases are married and already have children.
Men on the other hand also choose to delay marriage for fear of being tied down by their wives and children and not being able to pursue their careers. Those who choose to get married early are also faced with a dilemma of whether to prioritize their families or their careers. Nonetheless, a large fraction of male fathers choose to prioritize their careers and end up spending less time with their families. That is why a career husband who arrives home after a trip can be surprised if his son to turns to the man’s wife and say “Mummy, uncle has come to visit.” This may perhaps explain the reason as to why men choose to keep long time girlfriends while some have been associated with siring babies outside wedlock.
Sharing of household responsibilities
A majority of the countries have come to accept affirmative action, which gives women an opportunity to work and demand for equal rights as their male counterparts. Over the years, there has been the recognition and acceptability of women’s contributions to the economic stability of the family and this has led couples to reassess the distribution of family and household tasks. The men have taken up some household responsibilities, which were previously solely associated and left to women such as taking children to school, following up on their homework assignments and school activities and performance, cleaning, cooking among other responsibilities. Thus, the husband and the wife must now reconcile the requirements of two work environments while meeting the family’s needs. Although women are still bearing the huge brunt, the men also find themselves facing issues of work life balance due to the inability to keep up with the demands of homely duties and their work duties.
Individual personality
Psychologists and other professionals have over the years associated different personality types with different behaviors and work life balance is no different. Two American cardiologists Rosenman and Friedman determi...