Employee Well-being
In order for organizations to succeed, they should inspire ingenuity while also nurturing talent and creating an inclusive workplace where individuals thrive and grow. Taking responsibility to employee well-being would be the key for the organization’s long-term profitability. Notably, several studies have already proven the connection between productivity levels and general health of the workforce. There is, nevertheless, the requirement to contemplate on how an individual’s job impacts his/her overall quality of life. In this essay, two amongst the issues that implicates employee well-being will be explored. These are work-life balance and job satisfaction. Work-life balance simply refers to the concept of prioritization between career and aspirations and pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development. Job satisfaction, on the other hand, describes how content an individual pertaining to his or her job. Specifically, it is the goal of this essay to discuss several work factors affecting the two issues and how HR takes on their role in dealing with these issues.
Work-life balance
Abrahamson and Wehner (2006) noted that motivation and sense of ownership are the drivers behind the degree of an individual’s contribution to company’s success. Therefore, the needs of the employees must be the foundation and at the core of quality of life and work-life balance schemes. This could result to high morale and enhanced competence of the workers. Although work-life balance requires inclusively and participation among the employees, Demartino et al (2006) noted that interventions should strive at empowerment and better career decisions. Not only it should focus on the wellness and health of the employees but the totality of an individual including physical, mental, spiritual, emotional and social aspects. Basically, there is the need to align organizational characteristics with self-concepts. In this way, mission, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized considerations (Baxter and Alexander, 2006) could be achieved by the organization.
However, there are work-life balance issues that should be taken into consideration. Brandon and Temple (2008) noted the changes in family structure and in the number of mothers working full- and part-time in Australia which considerably altered employment patterns, the composition of workforce and the roles that mothers and even fathers perform in the families. Employers also noticed the new 24-7 economy, the mixing of traditional gender roles and the feminization of the Australian workforce. As such, the growing numbers of employers know that family and work demands often conflict and that this conflict can affect the morale, productivity and retention of the workers. There is the necessity then to reduce the friction between family responsibilities and work demands to increase worker productivity while also decreasing unexcused absenteeism and unnecessary turnover.
Hyman and Summers (2004) noted that there is an uneven adoption of work-life balance policies such as family-friendly policies depending on the size and sector of the business. As such, these policies are not evenly distributed across sectors and organizations. Connell (2005) maintains that policies of this kind are a commonplace in organizations with specialized human resource function. Unionized sectors are also more likely to have arrangements which helped employees to balance work and domestic commitments. Another problem that stems from the previous is that those who implement such are untrained and lack awareness and understanding of family-friendly and work-life balance issues (Hayward, 2006). Hyman and Summers (2004) said that there is a wide variation in how these policies are implemented because there is no training in this at all and no HR involvement.
Sheridan and Conway (2001) state that in every organization striking a balance between the functional flexibility and the flexibility to assist employees to balance work and family responsibilities. As such, it is critical that the human resource management (HRM) role actively negotiate between the different needs of employers and employees. There is the necessity then to make both parties’ needs explicit, acknowledging about the differences between their needs and directing efforts toward outcomes that are mutually satisfying. Thereby, the new HR managers’ role extends beyond the traditional HR applications which must also perform roles of being employee advocate and change champions. HR managers’ advocacy tasks purports on creating and establishing a work environment wherein people will choose to be motivated, contributing and happy.
When there are policies in place, these are driven and taken from HR’s employee relations standpoint, neglecting the portion where views from be taken through a consensus. The third problem is that workers are incapacitated to speak and voice out their concerns individually or collectively, in establishing, implementing and influencing policies at the workplace. Lewison (2006) also claims that employees have limited influence in family-friendly arrangements. On the other end of the spectrum, when there are work-life balance policies, these are derived from business competitive factors. The main influence appeared to be labor-market driven especially in terms of recruitment and retention (Hyman et al, 2003). An emergent issue is that the business looks at its needs rather than the needs of the employees. Hardy and Adnett (2002) assert that there seem to be few incentives for employers to make moves to assist employees, unless motivated by their own, potentially short-term, needs.
Problem also arises when it comes to the notions of flexibility which appears to have had little practical impact on working hours. Hyman and Summers (2004) also argue that a significant factor in determining work-life balance is the control over the working environment. These include control over the length of the working day, the spatial location of work, and over number of hours worked. The reason behind this is that it helps to establish appropriate employee balances between the demands of work and home (Smith and Gardner, 2007). Connected with this are temporal adjustments problem to working time such as the introduction of flexi-time. The basic work-derived factor is the employee’s domestic life but in reality work-life balance is disrupted because of the fact that actual working hours for many people are increasing rather than decreasing (Green, 2001).
Baptiste (2008) asserts that the achievement of business-oriented performance outcomes has obscured the importance of employee wellbeing at work is a neglected area of injury within the field of HRM. Nonetheless, HRM practices adopted have a significant impact on employee wellbeing at work and tend to be more positive than negative. HRM must then focus on management relationship behavior in the form of support and development of trust, promoted employee wellbeing at work amongst workers.
Guest (2001) also continues that work and its effects can even intrude into people’s lives in ways that extend beyond the working day. Between home and work for specific occupations, some employees are also working on shifts and at weekends and with young families and some work extra hours without compensation. Scase (2002) said that some occupations are also likely to take work home with them, with over half taking work home on an occasional basis after putting in a full working day in their respective offices. Resultant factors are returning home exhausted, suffering impaired sleep, worrying about work whilst at home, and are generally stressed. In sum, achieving work-life balance when faced with substantial burdens and other multiple pressures is simply not a feasible option.
Baptiste (2008) also suggest that t he importance of management relationships, support and employees’ trust was found to predict wellbeing at work. The decision by management to embrace the business case for employee wellbeing at work is likely to complement more conventional methods of improving employee attitudes and productivity, which in turn can enhance organizational effectiveness and decision making. To foster an effective method towards goal-setting, communication and empowerment through responsibility is to build the sense of ownership amongst the employees. Through this, the HR manager not only motivates their people but also provides employee development opportunities and assistance.
Job satisfaction
As I already noted that the high levels of morale and the competence of the workforce is partly determined by work-life balance, it is an effective measure of empowerment and hence job satisfaction. At the very least, the cognitive, physical and emotional engagement positively translates stress and obligations into job satisfaction, job retention and experiences to the employees. Job satisfaction also correlates with the employees’ intent to seek promotion, greater responsibility, a career change or just to maintain employability. Fairbrother and Warn (2003) argue that a number of aspects of working life have been linked to stress and that aspects of the work itself can be stressful, namely work overload, and role-based factors such as lack of power, role ambiguity, and role conflict.
Further, stress is associated with impaired individual functioning in the workplace. Negative effects include reduced efficiency, decreased capacity to perform, dampened initiative and reduced interest in working, increased rigidity of thought, a lack of concern for the organization and colleagues, and a loss of responsibility. Fairbrother and Warn (2003) stress that the pressure associated with the role has a direct interplay with a low level of perceived control (i.e. externality), whereas job dissatisfaction was predicted by organizational climate, organizational influence and job constraints. Lynne et al (2000) noted therefore that teamwork and supportive climate were important for maintaining job satisfaction. A positive working atmosphere was particularly important for the job satisfaction of the employees.
Eikhof et al (2007) and Crowling (2005) also suggest that job satisfaction is independent of hours of work wherein long working hours increases or decreases job satisfaction especially that for many workers a long-hour corporate culture may not be so deleterious to their enjoyment of work. De Jonge et al (2000) states that the risk of emotional exhaustion, psychosomatic complaints and job satisfaction increased with the combination of heightened job demands and lessening control over determining elements of the job. This is why conflict between the demands of working life and the expectations of personal relationships contributed to lower job satisfaction. Nevertheless, job satisfaction has important implications for turnover and provides an additional reason to reduce the levels of experienced stress of the employees.
Kaye (2000) therefore recommends that the HRM should avoid using the hard model which focuses on the business and/or the company rather than the human aspect of the organization. In improving the bottom-line of the company, there is the need to reconceptualise the business direction to acknowledge the human endeavour of the organization. While doing this, commitment of the employees to become more productive will affect the performance not just individually but as organization as a whole. There is the link between making the work of the employees meaningful with their job satisfaction and part of this satisfaction stems from effective HR policies. Edgar and Geare (2005) also mention that effective HRM policies and practices should be measured by their perceived quality, not simply by the number of practices introduced, relating to the quality of the job and quality of the work itself which implicates the overall satisfaction of the employees..
All in all, work-life balance and job satisfaction are issues that affect the well-being of the employees thus employers must take responsibility over this if they mean to survive in the business. However, there are work-related factors that hinder such. For work-life balance, these are length of the working day, the spatial location of work, and over number of hours worked while for job satisfaction, these factors include work overload, and role-based factors such as lack of power, role ambiguity, and role conflict.
Furthermore, there are specific recommendations for the HR. First, through a consensus, HR should outline specific issues gathered about work life balance and job satisfaction. The activities are systematizing the data gathered and validating data. Next would be the resolution of issues and preliminary drafting of family-friendly policies.
To optimize the new policies, the HR must embrace the intelligent accountability concept whereby the purpose is to maintain a certain level of transparency, to always consider consensus and to manage the knowledge well. This collective visioning must be embedded in lateral capacity that directly intervene poor performance that affects the business as a whole. As such, it is also necessary for HR to incentives collaboration and the lateral capacity building so that the new policies could be effective in the long run.
References
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