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 organizatio...