Managing Human Resources: Work-Life Balance

Case Study: Work-Life Balance
Name
Institution
Case Study: Work-Life Balance
A Summary of the Case
The case study demonstrates the emerging trend in work places where employees have started realizing the importance of work-life balance. Today, majority of job seekers considers job flexibility as one of the major factors when accepting a job offer (Gomez-Mejia et al., 2012). This is common among employees with families, who would want to have considerable time for their families while they pursue their career ambitions. Most of employees think that when one’s career advances within their organization, for instance, when one reaches the managerial level, the scope of work or the workload reduces. Such a perception is ill-advised. In fact, when an individual climbs up in his/her career ladder within their organization, workload tends to increase in terms of responsibilities and objectives. This means that much would be expected from such an employee, demanding the employee to allocate more of his/her time to work in order to accommodate the addition responsibilities. While many employees are willing to sacrifice their time to ensure they meet their targets when faced with the addition roles, researches confirm that there is growing trend where employees are becoming adamant to do so, with the protest of the need for work-life balance. Companies have also acknowledged the growing desire among employees to have flexible work, and many are working towards providing frameworks that can facilitate the same (Gomez-Mejia et al., 2012). However, companies emphasize that work flexibility is only feasible in some employee and not everyone who demands it. Those who are more disciplined and goal-oriented have the highest chances of being considered for work flexibility that can allow one to work from home and be decisive of his/her work schedule.
Job Flexibility With Regards To Hours and Office Location
Organizations can have different forms of flexible working (Allen et al., 2013). The most common include those where employees have their working week with fewer days that the conventional ones. For instance, some companies would require an employee in a certain job to report to work for only four days per week unlike the traditional working week that have five to six days. The second example of flexible working entails homeworking, where an employee is allowed to work from home unless there is an urgent issue at the work place that requires one’s presence (Gomez-Mejia et al., 2012). The jobs that are fit for flexibility include those whose objectives can be achieved within short hours of working, after which the remaining time can be allowed for the employee to go home and spend with the family. For those employees whose offices are located far, for instance, in different countries or region, it would be necessary for the firm to allow job flexibility to enable the employee travel home to have some time to spend...